


This Nikki Heat Thing

by RachelCAstrid



Series: Writer!Kate [1]
Category: Castle
Genre: Angry Sex, Awkward Conversations, Backstory, Banter, Bets, Characters Writing Fanfic, Christmas, Dinner, Dom/sub Undertones, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, Elevator Sex, Epilogue, Episode Related, F/M, Falling In Love, Fantasizing, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Handcuffs, Happy Ending, Hotel Sex, Innuendo, Kissing, Leather, Light Bondage, Masturbation in Shower, Missing Scene, Movie Night, Not Wearing Underwear, Nude Modeling, Original Character(s), Party, Past Relationship(s), Pillow Fights, Public Sex, Reading, Remy's, Romantic Friendship, Russian Literature, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Teasing, Tipsy!Beckett, Trust, Vaginal Fingering, Weddings, Writers, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-17 19:38:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 49,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/871247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RachelCAstrid/pseuds/RachelCAstrid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fight at the Heat Wave book launch, Beckett escapes with an attractive distraction. But when she can't stop talking about Castle, Beckett finds out just what it is to be scorned - and picks up a habit that's hard to break. Meanwhile, Castle navigates Naked Heat and both work and play with Beckett.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Better Writer

**Author's Note:**

> Each chapter title (and the story title) is a phrase of dialogue from Castle and Beckett's fight at the book launch party.

In the aftermath, she tried to retrace their steps to figure out where they’d gone wrong.

He’d just told her that she was extraordinary. Made her smile. How did the conversation possibly end with them charging off in opposite directions, him retreating into the crowd to rub elbows and sign cleavage while she ended up at the open bar?

The gentleman beside her attempted to strike up a conversation with her, but she was too distracted to hear him the first time or two. He was either very persistent or very lonely, and the look in his eye when Beckett finally processed his presence and quirked an eyebrow in his direction told her it could be a bit of both. Nonetheless, there was a warmth to him that she found attractive—not to mention the solid slope of his stubbly jaw and the depth of his brown eyes. Beckett wasn’t looking for a man, but a little company at the bar couldn’t hurt.

They chatted, questionable pickup line-something-something, and he nodded coolly toward Castle before the Man of the Hour fully disappeared into the throng. “You two aren’t together?” he asked tentatively.

“God, no.” They were particularly _not-together_ after what happened between them. Kate gulped down half her drink in a flurry of irritation. She wasn’t sure whether her annoyance was the bitter aftertaste from the spat or the fact that she was losing count of how many times she’d had to answer that stupid question. At least Castle wasn’t around this time to chime in, _“Not yet.”_ He’d done it once before, and once was more than enough.

Her impromptu companion nodded, as though pleasantly surprised and yet not entirely sure that he could believe her.

Fine. She had no problem laying it on thick. “Writers,” she grumbled, as though nothing in the world mattered more than telling anyone who would listen how much she did not like Richard Castle and his kind. “Pretentious and cocky. Is there anyone with a bigger ego?”

“I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful, considering her rhetorical question more thoroughly than it deserved. “Models?”

Funny. If she’d posed the question to Castle, he probably would have said con artists. Or CIA agents. Or con artists posing as CIA agents.

Beckett shook her head. They’d closed the Jenna McBoyd case two weeks ago, but she remembered the personalities they’d encountered all too well.

Sure, models needed confidence to be effective, and some like Sierra were undeniably cutthroat, but in Beckett’s mind there was at least one major difference between a model and an author.

“No,” she countered. “Any command they show on the runway is usually a reflection of the people who bark orders at them. They constantly defer to others; even the divas.”

Her companion was unfazed. “So do writers.” He took a swig of his drink and licked his lips. “Publishers, editors, agents, intended audience . . . They all have influence, right?”

“Maybe,” she conceded half-heartedly, the bitterness still licking at the back of her throat, “but writers think they can go and create their own world, and then they have the audacity to think that anyone else wants to follow them into it.”

Never mind the fact that, as an avid reader, Kate often _did_ step willingly into the worlds of her favorite authors—including a certain shadow of hers. She’d already read more than enough of Heat Wave to know how little of her own reality made it into the novel. Case in point.

She glanced out to the crowd. Tonight’s featured author was nowhere in sight. “They take the truth and twist it to their liking,” she murmured.

“That may be so, but even fiction writers can be truth-tellers.” The finality to his tone was not the sort that suggested that he’d just gotten the last word in a debate but simply that he was willing to let the conversation move on.

She was surprised to find that she was ready to let the conversation move on, too—that the bitterness was beginning to subside and that she was willing to keep sitting here with a drink and a man she had just met, like some sort of normal person.

Well, if she was going to spend the evening chatting with strangers, Beckett decided to take the reins. “So, what do you do when you’re not at parties like these?”

He nodded lightly as though in approval of the change in subject; swallowed his last sip. “I run a coffeehouse.”

She didn’t frequent that scene, but she could certainly appreciate any place that sounded like a Coffee Temple. “Mm,” she hummed, “a man after my own heart.” She toasted him and took another mouthful.

He paused, as though reconsidering full disclosure. “And I write.”

Oh, of course he did. She didn’t let the information throw her; never apologized for the way she’d tried to rip writers apart. She’d really only meant to take down one particular writer, after all. Instead, she asked casually, “Publish anything?”

His yes was surprisingly modest, and she wondered whether it was his true character or the conversation that they’d just had.

“Anything I might have heard of?”

He smiled, offering a half-shrug. “I’ll be fortunate to achieve posthumous fame.”

She pictured the thick volumes of classic literature on her shelves, nestled between the art history books and the mainstream crime novels. “Artist ahead of your time, huh?”

“Publishers and readers don’t always agree with my creative choices. But I can’t imagine writing without saying what I wanted to say in the first place. So,” he said, with a glint in his eye, “maybe that means I’m even more egotistical than Castle is.”

She glanced away and smiled despite herself. “Probably.” Then she leveled her gaze on him. “What is it you want to say?”

The question disarmed him, as though no one had ever asked him point-blank before. “Hopefully the kind of thing that inspires people to be better,” he said finally. “To live more fully; to forgive. To love.”

She snorted before she could stifle it. “Oh, you _are_ even more egotistical than Castle. I think he mostly just likes puzzles and messing with people’s heads.”

He laughed. “I didn’t say I _succeed._ But the goal is worth it to me. You ever have any worthwhile causes that you wouldn’t give up on?”

She tucked her hair behind her ear—unnecessarily, since it was partially pulled back. “Sure.”

“Then you understand,” he said simply. “So.” He looked her up and down, appraising, yet not predatory. “Nikki Heat.”

“Beckett. Kate,” she corrected.

“That’s right.” He proffered his hand. “Vince Minaret.”

She took his hand, but both seemed to forget to let go. “I haven’t heard of you.”

“Until now,” he said, simultaneously admiring her and forgiving her candor.

“Yes,” she agreed, “until now.”

He smiled warmly, finally releasing her hand. “But I’ve heard of you.”

“Ugh,” she groaned, “Castle.” She could kill him for dragging her into the public eye like this.

 _“Do you have any idea,”_ she’d spat at him tonight, _“how much grief I’ve had to put up with over this Nikki Heat thing?”_

“Good things,” Vince said, and she softened at the silken texture of his voice. He leaned in close, narrowly escaping her jaw-line for her ear—a Castle move if ever there was one—and Beckett’s heart caught in her throat. “Only good things.”

* * *

“Yo, Castle,” Esposito called, as he and Ryan caught up with him across the room. “You seen Beckett?”

“Nope,” he said curtly, as though disappointed to be interrupted while schmoozing with a brunette no more than ten years Alexis’ senior.

“Would you?” she asked, slipping the strap of her red cocktail dress down her shoulder and tilting her head demurely.

“Of course,” he obliged. He whipped out a felt-tip marker from his pocket, and Ryan and Esposito exchanged a look while Castle leaned in to autograph the bared flesh.

“Well, you have any idea where she went?” Ryan pressed.

“Hmm?” Castle shook the marker and briefly touched its tip to his tongue. “Huh. Running dry.”

“I wonder,” Esposito muttered under his breath.

Castle didn’t seem to hear him. “What’s it matter, anyway? Nothing new on the case, right? And we’re off the clock.” He tried again to ink the bombshell, and when the marker crapped out on him once more, he reached deftly into Ryan’s breast-pocket and pulled out a pen.

Ryan gawked at him, jaw slack and brows furrowed, but Esposito didn’t miss a beat: “We are off the clock, bro. Looks like _you’re_ hard at work.”

“Yeah.” Ryan grinned, confirming with a glance to Esposito that the double entendre didn’t go unappreciated. “We were just hoping you could take time out of your busy schedule to help us find Beckett. Captain’s talking to someone he wants her to meet.”

Castle finished his signature and smiled dashingly at the brunette. “Sorry I didn’t have a marker.”

“Are you kidding?” she said. “Richard Castle the Author just wrote on my body with a _pen._ I feel like a bestseller.” She winked at him and sauntered away, her strap still dangling off her shoulder.

Castle shrugged at Ryan and Esposito. “You’re the detectives. I’m sure you’ll find her.” He restored the pen to Ryan’s pocket, patted it through the suit, and turned to go. “Hey, thanks for the pen.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said to Castle’s back, brows furrowed up into his forehead again. “Any . . . time.”

Castle hadn’t gotten far before he saw a flash of pale blue fabric and brown curls unobtrusively sneaking through a door that, if he remembered correctly, led to a back hallway and not too much else.

He couldn’t see her face, but he’d know those legs anywhere.

He wrenched his body in one direction and then the other, conflicted about whether to let her go or follow her or just send Ryan and Esposito to fetch her for Montgomery.

Oh, shit. He was not supposed to have to think this hard at book launch parties. First Paula pressed him for a decision on the new book deal and now this. Stay or go? Cold shoulder or hot pursuit? Everything about Kate Beckett complicated his life, and this wasn’t the first time that the thought occurred to him.

But detectives and authors had at least one thing in common: The bad ones shut down possibilities too soon.

Not that Castle was feeling too guilty about the way that their conversation had ended, but it remained true to him that a closed door didn’t always mean an open window. Sometimes it meant an untimely end to a story in progress.

Despite all the drama she could kick up, Kate Beckett made him want to be a better writer, if not also a better man.

He was right when he’d told Paula that he wasn’t sure that he was ready to walk away from Nikki Heat—the one on the page or, truth be told, the inspiration in the flesh.

He was still angry, and yet he wasn’t sure that he could end things with the conversation that had the two of them parting ways in anger; with her walking away now.

So for a moment he decided not to think so hard about it and just slipped out the door after her.


	2. Never Been Scorned

She’d gotten quite the head-start, but Castle could hear heels clicking around the corner and figured he was on the right track. He broke into a run.

“Bate!” he yelled, frustrated with his own inarticulate mess as he apparently decided not even halfway through her name to call her Kate instead of Beckett.

Down the empty hallway, the door closed the final inch.

Fine, then. If Beckett didn’t want to stick around for the party, have drinks, meet people, relax—that was her prerogative. He wasn’t about to let it ruin his evening.

He turned and headed back to the party where he was the most honored man in the room, all too aware that the one person whose admiration he wanted was no longer there.

If he hadn’t felt scorned—bitter and just a little bit injured—he would have gladly traded every associate and acquaintance for the detective that got away.

* * *

The heavy door slammed shut behind them, and Kate couldn’t stifle the laugh that emerged from her. Outside of work, it wasn’t too often that she experienced the spike of adrenaline that she’d come to associate more with shootouts and chasing suspects, and the satisfying escape made her feel a little bit more alive; a little less like the pursuer and more like the pursued.

He took her hand and led her safely out of the back alley. They made it to the sidewalk amidst waves of pedestrians and the cacophony of traffic when Vince spun suddenly, facing her, letting his gaze travel her body and undoubtedly noticing the way that her breath caught.

“I probably should have told someone I was leaving,” she said, as though working hard to keep her wits about her and not slip into a daze. “Not Castle, I mean. But the Captain, probably. . . .”

Vince took entirely too much enjoyment in reminding her: “You’re off-duty, Detective.” He thumbed her cheek and drew her into him for a soft kiss.

The embrace may have been gentle, but the adrenaline pounded through her. Her eyes were still closed when she found enough of a voice to respond. “I—I know.”

“So you don’t need to report to work for, what, another nine hours?” The rest of the question was not asked in words but in the way that his stubble brushed her cheek as his teeth sought out her ear.

“Ten,” she said. Then again, she could be wrong. Time flies when you’re bashing writers and then fantasizing about bedding one. How long had she been talking with this guy now, anyway?

He smiled against her skin, lavishing her neck with attention, ignoring the inconsistent current of passersby that parted around them as he initiated a more intimate kiss.

She let herself lean into him, aware that she felt reassured that he’d made no motion to harm her and—an even greater concern tonight—that they hadn’t been swarmed by a hive of paparazzi. She liked this guy, but she would have been ignoring her cop instincts if she hadn’t considered once that he could be some kind of criminal or media hound.

No, this was wonderful and real and so un-Beckett, but she was already swept up in it; grateful that this rare moment wasn’t being interrupted by blinding photo flashes and the probability of a headline about Nikki Heat being caught in the act.

She murmured, “Maybe I owe Castle a thank-you after all.”

Suddenly Vince sighed, pulled away. He ran his hand through his hair in dejected realization. “You were looking for him,” he said gently. “When we were leaving—you were looking around, searching. For him.”

Mortification didn’t begin to describe her facial expression. “What? _No.”_

“For what? His permission? Or just to see if he was watching?”

“Vince, no—that isn’t . . . I was—avoiding the press.” Damn, had she ever in her life been such an awful liar? Was it the alcohol or the simple fact that something about Vince Minaret and his stupid sixth sense made it hard to lie to him?

She certainly didn’t need Castle’s permission for anything, and she didn’t want him to see her with Vince, but admittedly she had wondered where he was by the time Vince gently touched her leg and asked her if she wanted to get the hell out of there. What would Rick Castle say if he knew another writer picked up his so-called inspiration for Nikki Heat during the book launch party?

Now Vince studied her eyes, and even she knew she was busted. “You think about him a lot, don’t you?”

 _“You like him,”_ Will Sorenson had told her only mere months ago, when she’d failed to suppress a smile and the urge to mention Castle’s name.

 _“No, I just . . . I don’t know,”_ she’d admitted then. _“I think he’s—interesting.”_ And that was the truest answer she could have offered.

But even now, there was only so much that she was willing to admit, and replying to “You think about him a lot” with “I think he’s interesting” would not only be honest but far too revealing this time.

It came out one notch above a croak, but she managed: “We see a lot of each other.”

Oh, that sounded even worse than it was. She should have just said the jackass was interesting.

Interesting and infuriating and annoying and would Vince just please hurry up and kiss her again already?

But he didn’t. He stared back at her in silence with a merciful expression that pained her; pained them both. When he finally spoke, he used the same tone of voice that Beckett had once used to turn down Richard Castle’s invitation to a private debriefing: “It was nice to meet you, Kate.” He took her hand, smiled, and pivoted to go.

She watched his figure retreat, and once he was out of earshot, she fisted her hands and groaned in frustration. “Damn it, Castle!”

_“You’re just saying that because you’ve never been scorned. What man has ever turned you away?”_

She could kill him.


	3. Plenty to the Character

As she shut the front door behind her, meeting her empty apartment with a mutual silence, Kate Beckett reminded herself of one thing: She was more than her love life—or lack thereof.

In her bedroom, she slipped out of her high heels and her little Hervé Léger dress, and she decided, too, that she was more than her uniform, her badge; she was more than the job.

Of course, she knew that she was no less a vigilante in her evening wear. But she was peeling a pale blue dress off of herself tonight instead of working her way out of a buttoned blouse, and even she had to admit that she had liked the look of this particular layer of the metaphorical Beckett Onion.

Stripped naked now, she passed the dresser and paused to finger the box where she kept her mother’s necklace, and she told herself that she was more than a daughter out for justice. Tears welled up in her eyes as she thought it—also for the first time in all of the years that she had been walking the path that this tragedy chose for her—but she thought it just the same.

Three years of therapy and almost eight more years of personal coping mechanisms (the police force, the firing range, coffee, reading) all came to a head in that single thought: _More than a daughter out for justice._

And, as the bindings of a few murder mystery novels caught her eye, she knew that she was certainly more than an egotistical author’s so-called _muse._

She showered rather than bathed, more interested in washing the day off of her than soaking it in, but even then, she found that she was still too restless to go to sleep.

* * *

Paula had told him to “go get it out of his system.” This wasn’t what she meant.

The book was done, but Castle wasn’t. The rest of the book launch party had done little to alleviate his anger, and he was taking it out on his keyboard at home.

Never once did he see his You should be writing screensaver; the words leapt to the white screen with their own vengeance, voicing everything that Castle dared not sit idly to contemplate.

* * *

Once Kate had dressed for bed, she headed to the living room and curled up on the sofa, notebook and pen in hand. Sometimes she immersed herself in other people’s words, and sometimes she poured out her own.

At first, she simply scribbled a few free-floating thoughts on the page, the way that she did when she wasn’t sure what to write.

She had started writing poetry and song lyrics in college—being away from home and hanging out with a few friends who brought guitars everywhere they went had brought a creative side out of her. She wrote at least one song at the start of every new relationship, even though some of them didn’t make much sense—the songs or the relationships, for that matter.

She wrote lyrics and poetry about the trees that she appreciated a little bit more in California, about the crisp air rolling off the Pacific, about loneliness and longing, about the overwhelming sense of possibility with adulthood stretched out before her.

Then her mother’s death made her curl inward, speechless, voiceless; so far inward that only reading others’ words (and shooting paper targets) could bring her back out.

But in the end it turned out that the hurt outlived the creative block. She knew that poetry could never bring her mother back or give her justice, wasn’t even sure that it helped herself to cope the way that everything else did, but she also knew that in her three humble decades she had more to say about the world than she thought she did half a lifetime ago.

Tonight, she was in the middle of writing down what she imagined would be a song when the unexpected happened: a paragraph of full sentences, nothing like the verses and refrains that she usually wrote. It happened so quickly, taking her absolutely by surprise—this sudden and uncharacteristic foray into fiction.

It was Nikki.

* * *

Nikki Heat and Jameson Rook were angry—mutually angry, and mutually wrought with passion, both taking control wherever they could get it.

Whatever madness was going on with them, Castle allowed them to work it all out any way that they seemed to want to work it out.

They wrestled their way into furniture, shoved each other into walls, clawed at each other’s skin, and sucked dark bruises into being on necks and breasts and shoulders.

He never minded including steam here and there in his books; he just tended to leave anything that might be interpreted as bodice-ripping to chick-lit.

Well, if a bra qualified as a bodice, Rook had already ripped it off of Nikki—as well as her tight but modest boat-neck shirt. That ship had long since sailed. Along with the S.S. _Pantalones._ (Castle knew only so many words in Spanish, and most of them were articles of clothing or means of removing them.)

This particular trail of discarded clothing was not a long one. Thrusting and writhing against the door, the impatient lovers wordlessly opted to navigate their boxers and panties rather than waste any time removing them.

_Well, _Castle thought, _that’s one way to write an exposition.___

Charging into a scene like this without preamble (or, let’s face it, much foreplay) wasn’t really like the prolific writer. Richard Castle liked to know what got his characters where they were at any given point; what riled them up and what simmered them down.

So he should have known exactly what drove Heat and Rook into a literal battle of the sexes. No matter how many details he actually wrote, he was supposed to _know_ these things.

Yet all he knew was that they were already fighting each other—tooth and nail—by the time he got there.

He was just beginning to accept that the characters of his completed book were begging for an unpublishable sequel full of angry sex when the unexpected happened.

Nikki and Rook started _fighting._ With _words._

Call him crazy, but wasn’t that supposed to go the other way around?

But this was not just about sex.

Nikki Heat was afraid to be known, and Jameson Rook was getting to know her in all those ways that only a perceptive journalist could. Lovers and boyfriends could see only what they saw. Writers like Rook—like Castle, still to this day exploring this fierce cop character that the public would only now get to meet in his novel—writers could read people.

_Rook stood his ground. “Every time you let me in somehow, you go and find a different way to push me away.”_

As Castle typed, he heard Nikki’s response unravel like a voice in a dream—altogether far too mysterious and far too clear: _“There’s more to me than what you know, and I don’t trust you with it.”_

Is that what it all meant—the words that had most unsettled him tonight?

 _“Oh, there’s plenty to the character,”_ Beckett had snapped at him. _“She just needs a better writer.”_

* * *

Even Kate didn’t really know what she’d meant by that—if it even had been anything other than a way of lashing out at Castle and proving that she was above needing or wanting him to stick around.

The notebook in her hands stared back at her, the page no longer blank but now covered in telltale ink. Ink that read one thing, but in actuality teased: _Are you that better writer, Kate?_

Suddenly she realized the power she wielded. She could make these characters do anything. All the groundwork was done; the baseline of the canon established. She could give Castle that much credit—if regularly stalking her, stealing her life and twisting it to suit himself counted as creativity. 

She remembered that one time in college that she’d tried to write a story—what was that genre called again? Fanfiction?—for _Nebula 9._ Somehow this was even easier, maybe because there was more substance to the characters this time. There really was plenty to Nikki Heat to fill another book, even a simple notebook, and Kate would be lying to say that she didn’t enjoy figuring out what.

The best part? She always knew that she could do her job perfectly fine without Castle there; now she knew that she could do _his_ job herself. What a thought!

She fantasized about finishing her story. How would it end? Castle was always going on about twists and movement, conflicts and resolutions.

Obviously the conflict was that Jameson Rook was a dumbass, and Nikki Heat, crime fighter extraordinaire, could get along just fine without him. Kate decided that was her goal, then: Nikki Heat would emerge triumphant and fly solo again.

The only problem was that she couldn’t seem to get them to keep their hands off of each other, let alone to go their separate ways. It was all passing touches paired with passing glances, really, but still not conducive to the goal.

No, plotting took a little more discipline and attention than she had in her tonight. Coupled with her exhaustion from an eventful day, it was enough to make her drift off to sleep.

* * *

Eventually Castle realized that he was mostly just angry at himself. After all, he’d made it through one door while pursuing Beckett. Why didn’t he make it through the next?

In a sexless friendship, all he and Beckett really had were spoken words and body language. Stop talking to one another, and there go the words. Part ways, and there goes the body language. Now they had nothing. It was infinitely worse than the longing he felt when they were together and just not _together._

Tonight he’d told her that she was extraordinary; seen a small, shy smile linger on her lips. If things had turned out differently—if they hadn’t abandoned ship so quickly, if he hadn’t just imagined that smile into being—he might have been holding her by now.

Or at least he could have been fighting with her by now. Anything but this. Anything but unraveling a scene where Heat and Rook go at it and then, well, verbally go at it.

It wasn’t long before he picked up the phone.

The voice on the other end struggled somewhere between professional and vaguely conscious: “Beckett.”

“Beckett,” Castle echoed, swallowing the rest of his sentence into a dry throat.

She opened one eye. _“Castle?”_

“Yeah?” he said tentatively.

“Is that you?”

“Yeah,” he repeated, waiting for the right words to come to him and fighting off lingering visions of Heat and Rook in a knockdown make-out.

“What the hell are you doing, calling me at—” (one glance at the clock, and she said the time as though it were a question in and of itself) “—two-thirty in the morning?”

She sounded so angry.

He didn’t know that she’d needed to grab her phone from the living room floor, that she was still stretched out on her sofa, or that she used the time that they were on the phone together to relocate her weary body to her bed. He didn’t know that she cracked her neck as she stood and thought to herself that she was glad she hadn’t slept there much longer.

Their call consisted of about a minute or so of lame excuses that he couldn’t quite sell, but was too proud, too guarded, too hurt to give up in favor of any truth. By the time they hung up, he hadn’t said anything of much substance, and he knew that she was still going to be mad at him come sunrise.

It was then that he remembered that he had left his sunglasses on her desk, and if a bit of good sense hadn’t kicked in just in time, he would have called her right back to tell her as much, even if it would have only given her one more reason to be angry at him.

It was just so good to hear her voice.


	4. Enjoy the Party

The energy in the loft was winding down after a fair share of excitement, not the least of which was Beckett backing up in laughter over something hilarious that Lanie had said, only to crash into Edgar Allan Poe and his glass of red wine.

She’d whirled around to find him blinking his eyes open, wiping the drops from his whiskers, and glancing down to assess the new stain on the shirt beneath his dark coat.

Before she’d even had the chance to apologize, Lanie chased Beckett with some paper towels, dabbing at her back and triumphantly declaring the black trench coat undamaged, while Castle relegated the raven on his arm to the snacks table and wandered off.

As the crowd dwindled, they found each other again, and she did get to apologize, which he brushed off rather graciously. Nevertheless, something made her stick it out and watch as more and more of the guests called it a night. When he escorted the last of them to the door, he turned around to see his mother and Beckett chatting near the kitchen.

“And then there were three,” he announced.

Martha sighed. “I’m afraid another one bites the dust, kiddo.” She stretched her arms and removed the oversized hat from atop her two-tone Cruella hair. Her broad, dramatic gestures did not quite betray exhaustion, but her voice was appropriately weary. “Ah! I think I’ll sleep like the dead tonight.” She winked at her son, smiled at Kate, and wished them both a very good night and a happy Halloween.

They reciprocated the sentiments, and Castle’s gaze fell to his sole remaining guest. She had left her coat open, but detached the green creature, retiring it from its post on her costume and placing it on the counter. Castle inwardly kicked himself for missing the moment that she’d removed it.

“I’m sorry about the wine,” she said firmly, as though she hadn’t said it an hour ago. “Ruining your costume.”

“Don’t be,” Castle insisted. “I think a bloodstain suits Poe. It’s an improvement.”

She laughed despite herself.

He gestured to the decorative spring on the counter, trying in vain not to picture it dangling off her hip inside her open coat instead. “Where’d you get—that—anyway?”

She finger-combed the creature’s sparkly, silver hair. “You mean Margot?”

Castle didn’t even bat an eye at the fact that the creature had a proper name. “Yeah,” he said with a grin. “Did you put that together especially for me?”

Her eyes caught the light and her lips curled into her quirky smile—the one that said she was ready to parry with him. “No, it’s just something I had lying around.”

He looked at her, Margot-less and entirely plain-clothed, and chuckled: “I still can’t believe you didn’t wear a real costume.”

“Just showing you another side of myself, Castle.” It was out before she could censor it. Her smile disappeared instantly, and she fumbled her way into a change of subject. “Alexis still hasn’t left her room?” she asked lamely, her shift into a more defensive posture upstaging the genuine concern.

It was a true fumble, because Castle picked up the ball and ran with it. “You weren’t going to come tonight, were you?” He studied her face to gauge the reaction that she would be unlikely to voice aloud.

Sure enough, she didn’t answer, but her halfhearted smile gave her away.

He couldn’t restrain himself or the curiosity in his eyes. “What changed your mind?”

“Besides the chance to prank you?” she volleyed.

“Besides that—if,” he said, pausing tentatively, “if there is another reason.”

_I got the official offer. . . . I haven’t accepted it yet. . . ._

_. . . Is there a reason why you wouldn’t?_

They were always dancing around one another, beckoning each other to be the first to cave to uninhibited self-expression. But all of this verbal dancing only left a circle of scuffmarks at their feet. It never took them anywhere.

And why should that change tonight?

Maybe it was only fair for him to put her on the spot now after she had just recently done the same to him at his book launch party. But that didn’t mean that she had to answer any more cooperatively than he did.

He’d acted as though her wellbeing depended upon his presence or something. _You’d be okay if I didn’t write another Nikki Heat?_

So she took a page out of his book and deflected back to him. “Please. Why else would you have invited me?” Her tone was just light enough to convince him not to divulge a sincere response—and he had plenty of them.

It didn’t matter, though. Even if she really didn’t have any other reason for donning a puppet and a trench coat and wandering to his loft after nine o’clock at night, the possibility that a single prank was worth all that effort meant something to him.

It meant she wanted to play.

He smiled, picked up Margot from the countertop, and closed in on Beckett’s personal space. “Here.”

She took a breath as his fingers swept lightly against her abdomen to affix Margot to the cloth at her hip. She knew that the touch was utilitarian, but it felt intimate if only because they so rarely touched each other—especially _there_ —and maybe just a little bit because she was picking up on his _I’ve invited you to bed before and the offer still stands_ vibe.

And yet he was so gentle, so careful to touch only as much as was necessary to complete the practical task. Well, other than poking the creature’s little red nose to see the goofy accessory bob its head.

Castle was the first to look up, but she met his eye, and he said softly, “Now you’re yourself, Kate.” It was too honest, too intimate a statement for either of their comfort, so he covered with: “It suits you, you know.” _This side of you._ His thought was unvoiced, but it shone in his eyes; his attempt at a cover was no less honest and no less intimate.

Beckett modestly ducked her head and walked toward his front door, taking the opportunity to break eye contact, even as she glanced at him trailing behind her. But instead of giving him the satisfaction of their unspoken communications, she chose to interpret the too-true statement in a way that would allow their companionable banter to kick in. “It’s not too _Aliens_? Creepy things busting out of my guts?”

“Nah,” he chuckled, seeing her through the doorway. “Just _Aliens_ enough.”

“I’ll see you Monday,” she said, her tone clearly casual lest it sound too much like a date or, worse yet, a promise she looked forward to keeping.

“Yeah,” he managed, effectively struck dumb anyway. “I’d better—” He jutted his thumb over his shoulder and tilted his head in an I-should-be-going-the-opposite-direction sort of gesture. “Yeah. Sleep.”

But Castle couldn’t sleep, his entire being alight with electricity. As soon as he closed the door behind her, he turned around to face his loft and momentarily forgot all about changing out of his costume and getting to bed.

He washed dishes. He gathered trash. He tidied the tabletops. He swept the floors. Their cleaning lady, Alicia, was coming tomorrow. He was a pro at scheduling major events just before her visits—so much more valuable than having her come clean the place before the crowd, especially when half the decorations were fake cobwebs, anyway. The cleaning lady was coming _tomorrow,_ and he cleaned the entire common space of the loft. He just couldn’t stop himself.

Time may have flown particularly fast because he was singing. He was _singing._

“A ma-a-a-an’s _gotta_ do what a man’s gotta do,” he crooned into an aerosol microphone. He whipped a dishtowel around and began to serenade an open bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape on the kitchen counter: “Seems destiny ends with me saving you. . . .” He slammed the towel onto the counter and swiped up the wine bottle in a valiant rescue maneuver before sealing it with a stopper to preserve the wine.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, Martha stood at the top of the stairs, listening to her son bustle about the loft in all of his melodic glory. Smiling, she simply returned to her room to let him entertain himself into a productive stupor. Yes, she decided with pleasure, her only son had certainly inherited her theatrical flair.

* * *

Sunday morning found Kate sitting in a deep red armchair in a quiet corner of a bustling café. Her vanilla latte was nearly finished and very nearly cold, untouched since about page 14 of her no-longer-very-spontaneous prose.

Heat and Rook were on the case.

 _Were,_ as in the past tense (was it just Kate, or were fictional homicides suddenly more difficult to solve?). For no particular reason that she would be willing or able to articulate, the storyline with the murder investigation had stalled, and in the meantime, Heat and Rook had found themselves inexplicably staking out a mansion in some undisclosed location.

Kate figured she should probably know something about this place, being the writer and all. Yet as soon as she identified herself with that word—that _word_ —even in a passing thought, she ignored any imposing “instinct” about what she should or should not be doing. Besides, in her experience, writers didn’t seem to have that much regard for rules anyway.

_She found him in the wine cellar. “There you are,” she said with a smile that was both hungry and satisfied. As though accentuating the fact that they were entirely alone, Detective Heat kicked the door closed behind her with the heel of her boot, never breaking their eye contact._

_“How did you find me?”_

_“WWJRD,” she replied: “What Would Jameson Rook Drink? And we’re out of tequila, so. . . .” She gestured to the casks of wine._

_“Are you drawing a comparison here to Jesus? Because I can have you calling out to God in a minute.”_

_“Only a minute?”_

_He grinned, and she could tell he was sizing her up. “Judging by the look on your face? Yes.”_

_“You’re so cocky, Rook.”_

_She was surprised that he simply responded: “I stand by my estimate.”_

_Nikki closed in on him, crowding him without touching him. “What makes you think that’s how this is going to go in the first place?”_

_He stood his ground, clearly resisting every impulse to grab her right then and there. “How is this going to go, Nikki?”_

_She liked to lead, and she was enjoying his restraint. But it seemed just as much fun to pretend that she wasn’t about to take charge; to pretend that they were making some kind of mutual discovery. “Let’s find out,” she whispered at his ear._

_Rook was caught up in her proximity and her scent. “You smell like cherries,” he said._

_Her only response was to lean into him for a deep, wet kiss. Their hands trailed along each other’s faces and down their bodies as they tasted one another. Nikki pulled back; pulled her shirt over her head, slipping out of the sleeves before Rook could take advantage of her preoccupation. She needn’t have worried. Before he knew what was what, she pulled down her own bra straps and undid the clasp. She pressed her bare skin to Rook while she opened his leather belt and tugged his dress shirt loose to the tune of his groaning anticipation. Then Nikki reached beneath his waistband, finding him—_

A smug voice from behind her broke into her thoughts: “Stroking your ego?”

Kate leapt out of her skin. Barely recovering, she slammed the notebook shut on her lap and turned her body just enough to face the man who had come up behind her to lean in just behind her ear. “What are you doing here?”

“Given everything we know of one another,” said Vince, straightening his posture and rocking back on his heels, “I think it’s a more pertinent question to ask what _you’re_ doing here.”

Her eyes widened in realization and she glanced around the room. “Is—is this your—?”

“No,” he said. With a handful of pastry, he gestured to the red armchair beside hers. “May I?” he asked, but he didn’t bother to wait for permission before plopping down.

“You run a coffeehouse,” she said, as though reminding him. “Why would you go out to a café?”

He pointed to the pastry in his other hand as though the answer were already obvious. “Don’t have Danishes at our coffeehouse.”

“You could start selling them.” By now she sounded like she wanted to get rid of him, and frankly, she did. “Reasonable thing to find at one, isn’t it?”

“But then I wouldn’t have a good reason to stop in at someone else’s café.” Vince grinned. “And run into the kinds of writers who prefer cafés to coffeehouses.”

She scoffed, “I am _not_ a writer—”

“—who is _not-writing_ right now,” he finished for her. “I see that, yes.”

Kate narrowed her eyes at him, but he was too busy taking a big bite of Danish to be affected.

He had just barely swallowed when he asked, “Did you know the Danish actually has Austrian origins?”

“Really?” she said, feigning interest with the thought that it might just make him leave sooner.

“There it’s called ‘Plundergebäck.’ Great name, right? Just say it once; you’ll be hooked. Plundergebäck. Plundergebäck. I can never say it just once,” he laughed, but sobered quickly at her unchanged expression. “Anyway, some Austrian bakers made it in Denmark, and the Danes eventually tweaked it and made it a specialty. So we called it Danish, but they called it Wienerbrød, for Vienna.”

She shook her head slowly, her lips pursed together in both bemusement and impatience. “Is nothing sacred?” she teased, the humor tempered with surprisingly less sarcasm than she might have intended.

“What are you working on?” he asked, switching gears without warning, and suddenly Kate wished he would teach her more about pastry history. _‘Is nothing sacred?’_ indeed. Seeing her hesitation, he added: “Or playing with? You know, if it’s not work, per se.”

“It’s—not. It’s not really anything.”

“Poetry, fiction, nonfiction . . . Could be anything,” he said, as though reading her and not discerning many details. “But there’s a story in your eyes—no doubt about that.”

“Really?” Kate snorted. “Because the story fell off the tracks at least five pages ago.” _Damn, _she thought. She definitely had to brush up on her poker face if she intended to get back in the box with a suspect anytime soon. Maybe scribbling words à la stream-of-consciousness all morning was getting her in the habit of saying more than she should. Where was a censor when she needed one?__

__But while she was schooling her features and vowing to be more careful, Vince was already answering her like what she’d said was no big deal, like she’d told him that she was getting a cold and he was giving her the rundown on rest and fluids. “Ah,” he said. “That’s no problem. At this point, there’s a few ways you can go about it. You can revisit your vision of the overall story and look at what seems to be slowing it down or derailing it. You can free-write to see if a different story may be emerging. . . .”_ _

__He sat there with her for a short while, advising her, guiding her, anticipating very reasonable questions before she even voiced them. By the time his tone and body language hinted that he was winding down, Kate couldn’t recall just how much of the conversation she had actually initiated, because part of her honestly was wrapped up in this world he’d created for her in which she was some sort of storyteller with something worth putting on paper._ _

__“So, what do you say?” He gestured to the closed notebook still resting on her lap. “You ready to give it another go?”_ _

__“I don’t know,” she groaned, exasperated despite the wisdom she’d been handed, or perhaps suddenly burdened with it. “I wouldn’t _do_ this.”_ _

__She thought she meant that she wouldn’t _write_ (and God, why was she _writing_?), but Vince had already accepted that her writing was now a given and simply thought that she wouldn’t do whatever she was writing—none of which he’d seen. She never volunteered it, and he never asked._ _

__“It’s not about what _you_ would do,” he said, and he stood to leave, as though his parting advice would be so simple and all-encompassing that she would have no questions. He smiled, gave a little shrug. “It’s about what your characters would do. Just put them together and enjoy the party.”_ _

__“Oh,” was all Kate could say, watching him go without so much as a goodbye from either of them._ _

__So far Nikki Heat was enjoying the party a little too much._ _

__But then, Kate wasn’t exactly about to end it._ _


	5. Turned You Away

Both detective and shadow found it warming to look into Skye Blue’s face, weary with tears and despair, and tell her that her older sister had been clean of drugs before she died. But Beckett in particular felt as though she had given the young woman something precious and invaluable; not all that different, in fact, from how it felt to give a victim’s loved ones the closure of a solved case. Strange, she thought, to experience a small wave of that feeling even before they had a solid lead.

On their way back to the Crown Vic, Beckett took out her cell and made a call. “Hey, Ryan,” she said, less of a greeting and more of a preamble to her request: “we need warrants on Bree Busch. Phone, financials—the usual.”

She glanced over to Castle, strapping himself into the passenger seat, silently nodding along to her orders as though he were receiving them personally—or giving them. He was oblivious that she noticed, but she rolled her eyes anyway.

As she ended the call, she revved the engine and pulled away from the band’s rehearsal space.

“Precinct?” Castle asked, seizing an opportunity to guess their next move. As usual, whether it was a way to prove that he knew investigative procedure or to prove that he knew Beckett, neither of them could be sure.

But Beckett didn’t mind in the least telling him when he was wrong. “East Village,” she replied, eyes forward as she drove. “Zack said Hayley was writing songs at Syncopation Coffeehouse on Sunday, right? The address is in the East Village, which is where McGinnis said Hayley and Skye used to play before the fame. Either Hayley’s going back for the sentiment of the place or—”

“—she’s still close to someone there,” Castle finished for her, redeeming his previous inaccuracy, if only in his own eyes. He smiled to himself and added a tally to his column on the imaginary scoreboard in his head.

Beckett let the interruption roll off of her. Okay, so Castle had his moments of perceptiveness. For the sake of clarity (not collaboration), she added: “Someone who may have more insight about whoever Hayley would think of as ‘Death’—Bree or otherwise.”

* * *

When they arrived at Syncopation, they hit a distinct wall of various competing and not entirely incompatible scents of coffee. If the sign outside hadn’t read “coffeehouse,” the fact would have been impossible to miss just the same.

There was a light crowd: small groups and individuals scattered about in the stools by the windows, the circular tables around the room, and the leather furniture in the corners. Upstairs was more seating, similarly occupied, and a modest stage, which was empty on this Tuesday afternoon; instead, pre-recorded acoustic music sounded over the speakers to provide the room with its relaxed yet creative atmosphere.

Castle soaked it in—the vibe of the people, the age of the architecture, the arrangement of the furnishings—making writer’s notes in his mind, only to decide that there was nothing of such great interest that it deserved to be written down. Assisting in investigative work as a whole was inspiring, but it was no accident that he usually preferred to work in his home office than in a place like this. A coffeehouse was a coffeehouse.

The man behind the counter was serving a customer, so Beckett opted to put her mission to talk to him momentarily on hold. It was just long enough for her to notice the contents of the glass encasement along the counter and the wide stretch of the menu hanging high on the wall.

“They don’t sell Danishes here,” she realized, not intending to say it out loud. Either this was Vince Minaret’s place, which she still didn’t know by name or location, or multiple coffeehouses would do well to expand their bakery selections.

“Mm, I could go for a bear claw,” said Castle, immediately stalking the glass case like a graceless hunter.

Her potential witness was working the cash register, almost ready for her, so she put an end to her distracted gaze around the room; but Castle tuned in to it, sidled up to her so as not to be overheard. Sometimes his inconspicuousness was so conspicuous that she wondered how they hadn’t both been killed by now.

Castle asked in a low voice: “You looking for someone else or is that our guy?”

“No, he’ll do, and whoever else is here,” she said nonchalantly, using the time that the customer took to walk away to reassume her all-business posture. “Excuse me, sir. . . .”

They came up empty on their mysterious caller with the dubious distinction of “Death,” or any other clue as to who or what would have made Hayley so nervous.

The few staff members on shift confirmed that Hayley used to perform here with her sister and that she still sometimes returned to write—“Get in touch with her roots, you know?”—and that she did see Zack on Sunday. But otherwise, they hadn’t seen anything unusual or contentious happen while Hayley was around. Their statements simply corroborated Zack’s: Hayley did seem on edge on Sunday, and she left the coffeehouse very much alive.

Looked like Bree Busch was still their best bet. Beckett hoped that the warrants Ryan called in would set them on course to close this one.

* * *

“Nice sheets, Castle,” Beckett laughed, gently fingering the fabric, and then suddenly pulling her hand away as though caught in a lascivious act.

What the hell was she doing here, anyway?

Since the last case settled down, they had decided to attend Skye’s debut performance—one of the most concrete ways that the detective had ever had the opportunity to pay tribute to a victim. As though Castle’s family hadn’t already seen enough of Beckett for one evening, they invited her back to the loft, an invitation that she foolishly found compelling. And now that she was here, yet again after nine o’clock at night and without the psychological protection of her badge—her aptly named shield—things were beginning to feel terribly, inescapably complicated.

Yet here she stayed, admiring Castle’s bed-sheets.

“All the better for watching movies,” he replied in singsong. He stood back to appreciate the oversized screen hanging in the living room, proud of his innovative tradition and—why, yes, he did secretly take some credit for the muted flush of pink that fleetingly colored her cheeks. Another tally in his column on the imaginary scoreboard. One of these days he was going to draw up that scoreboard on a hanging bed-sheet. Or a warm, tangled one.

And oh, Castle realized not for the first time, nothing kills the inkling of a dirty thought as quickly as your teenage daughter _and_ your mother walking into the room.

Alexis approached them just then and, not the least bit shyly, delivered one of the two ceramic mugs in her hands to the detective. “You should see our blanket forts,” she said, smiling brightly with all the joy of an adventurous childhood.

Martha handed a third mug to her son, keeping the last for herself. “Nothing like a film and a hot cup of cocoa after a chilly candlelight service-slash-tribute concert,” she sighed happily, sinking into a soft seat. “So, what’s the verdict? Have we made a selection?”

Beckett turned to Alexis for an answer, but the household turned to Beckett—the reigning guest, as it would seem.

She fumbled: “Oh, I don’t—”

“If you don’t pick one,” Castle warned, “you’ll have to endure one of our infamous shadow puppet shows.” He set his mug down by the projector and immediately took up the task of casting carefully-contrived, silhouetted characters on the screen, complaining when Alexis didn’t provide the usual voice-work for the lizard-dragon-dinosaur-thing which, he insisted, she always gave such believable depth.

“Dad,” she groaned, embarrassed for only the first time since they got home.

“Hey,” he countered. “With all the glory of the Digital Age comes the unfortunate reality that rising generations are forgetting the sanctity of the shadow puppet on a movie screen. I want my kids and my grandkids to know—”

“Kid _s-s-s?”_ laughed Martha, while, simultaneously, Alexis reacted with her own due alarm: _“Grandkids?”_

Beckett busied herself with her cocoa.

Castle held up the nearest movie. “We’re watching this one,” he announced.

The decision was uncontested.

* * *

The four of them fell into the comfortable rhythm of laughter and commentary and passing popcorn and shushing one another at vital lines.

Alexis contained herself until the very end of the movie, when the cinematic renderings of a world beyond her urban backyard ignited her imagination: “I can’t wait to travel. Someplace faraway and exciting and—”

“—for more than six hours,” Castle filled in.

Alexis blushed in that unbearably obvious way that only a fair redhead can, looking past her father to Beckett but not quite meeting her eye. “Mom took me to France for, uh, lunch once.”

Funny. . . . It was the first time that Beckett heard about Meredith from Alexis’ perspective without Meredith also being in the room, and, naturally, in the spotlight. Even though she’d essentially understood the circumstances of the short-lived marriage and the—ongoing, if sporadic, relationship, tonight was the first time that she really processed Castle’s function as father-and-mother and not just the bachelor-dad; the first time that she realized how much of Alexis’ life had been lived in her mother’s absence. About as many years as Beckett had lived without hers.

No, this was different, she reminded herself. She couldn’t pretend to understand that kind of absence, that kind of occasional presence, or what they meant to Alexis. It was wrong to forge an automatic connection to her that way; selfish to try to fill the hole in her own heart with an imagined commonality to any semi-motherless daughter who came along.

But she did know what it was to want to see the world; what it was to believe she could be anything and go anywhere that she could imagine; what it was to outgrow her own identity and go looking to try on new hats.

Beckett smiled gently, breezing past the tale of the extravagant lunch-date to spare Alexis further discomfiture. “Where would you most want to go?”

And they were off—traveling to all different lands through the simple but undeniable power of words.

Castle’s heart crept into his throat a little bit.

He missed an entire chunk of their exchange—passing right over him across the couch—because he was momentarily lost in his own headspace; a possessiveness of his only daughter, a realization that she was growing up faster than he could bear, and a sense of pride that she loved the prospect of adventure about as much as he did.

And he guessed it was all right that she could have a jovial conversation with Beckett.

But, boy, did that innate, fatherly possessiveness ever poke its way into that thought. It was the first time that he was more jealous of _Beckett_ than he was of the person who was talking with her.

Alexis’ utter awe broke through his parental lament. “You went to the Ukraine?”

“Mm-hmm,” said the detective. “Semester in Kiev between junior and senior year.”

“Wow. . . .” Alexis opened her mouth again to ask about Kiev and studying abroad and _was it amazing?_ And _was it worthwhile?_

But instead, all they heard was Castle snicker: “You should hear her Russian accent.”

“Really!” Martha responded, genuinely delighted at the mention of a hidden theatrical skill, never mind the fact that she had allowed herself to become entirely too ensemble in this room when she’d refrained from so much of the after-movie discussion.

“Very convincing,” he hummed appreciatively, “especially—”

Beckett narrowed her eyes at Castle in a way that she hoped conveyed the utter seriousness of her demands. “Do _not_ recount that story.”

Castle’s eyes shone with every bit of humor that Beckett’s lacked. “Why? Alexis is mature enough.”

“It’s not _Alexis’_ maturity level that concerns me,” she said, smacking him with a throw pillow, her better judgment oddly silent on the action.

 _“Oomph,”_ Castle grunted on impact. “Because hitting me with a pillow is really mature.” He’d heard it said since the schoolyard not to hit a girl, but he also regularly abided by two other important principles of life: One, _she started it,_ and two, Beckett’s strong as hell. Her hit really _hurt._ So he retaliated.

She hit him again—a good blow to the shoulder that even grazed his jaw when he tried too late to block it.

He leapt up and dodged behind the couch, both for purposes of defense and a (failed) sneak attack.

They were, of course, absolutely unaware that their pillow fight looked like nothing more than a vengeful and violent form of pillow talk. But Martha, always the perceptive one, decided it was time that she and Alexis go to bed. Dutifully, she asked: “Can you call a détente long enough for us to say good night without getting caught in the crossfire?”

The room buzzed with an undercurrent of energy, even as the warriors lowered their weapons. They said their good-nights, and on her way out, Martha added a hearty, “Thank you for the company. It was a lovely concert and movie night,” and a _sotto-voce_ whisper of, “There’s a set of guest towels in the bathroom and plenty of food in the refrigerator. . . .”

Beckett missed that much, taking a deep breath to recover from the skirmish and blindly arranging her hair (and making it just a little worse before it got better, Castle pleasantly discovered when he glanced back at her).

But Castle caught the drift, and although his mother and daughter knew that he sometimes had _company_ (and, frankly, he did a fine job of timing most of those occasions to involve an empty house), there was something dreadful about their exaggerated exit tonight.

Probably because he had a feeling that tonight wasn’t heading toward sex. Possibly because any wink or nudge from a third party always seemed to make it that much less likely that they would actually have sex. Oh, and, regardless of what she heard or didn’t hear, Beckett wasn’t smiling anymore.

All right, so a pillow fight was like taking their usual banter to the next level, another vaguely platonic but exhilaratingly physical way to expend that Unresolved Sexual Tension (and _surely_ by now she could not deny it was there?). But Castle reminded himself that his own intentions had been pure and, well, _she started it._

If he’d ever been told in his youth that a pillow fight could be considered flirting (or—God help him—foreplay) he’d have been the most popular guy in school. He also would have been kicked out of even more of them.

Nevertheless, even more intriguing to him was the knowledge that Beckett could be provoked to participate in such a skirmish, let alone initiate one—and, at one point, he swore, _did_ have a delicious smile on her face. Still standing behind the sofa, he chuckled, “Just wait until the next Nikki Heat book debuts and everyone finds out that Kate Beckett likes pillow fights.”

“Ugh, _Castle.”_ Smacking him in the gut with the pillow again, she rose from the sofa and erupted with surprising exasperation and no great amount of clarity: “I don’t want to be Wienerbrød!”

Castle laughed outright at the uncommon word and her exuberant declaration. Then, realizing that she was apparently serious, he stared back at her, dumbfounded. “Beckett, _what_ are you talking about?”

That damned Nikki Heat! Would he never get it? She had no words—no _words—_

She pointed to the ground beneath her: “Austria,” and then to him: “Denmark,” the sofa between them implicitly representing the expanse of Germany. Certainly felt to her as though there was that impressive a distance between them. Then she explained fiercely, as though the more passionately she said it the more it would make sense: “I don’t want to be Wienerbrød—I live my life and then you go and tweak it into Heat Wave and before long people are calling it Danish!”

He tried to follow her. He really did. “People are . . . Beckett. How much did you have to drink?” He made a show of leaning off to the side, over the sofa, to inspect the empty mug from her cocoa. “I’m afraid I need to cut you off.”

“Shut up.”

“No, I think I get it.” He offered her his best Serious Face.

She looked unconvinced, but amenable to listening. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, and when readers ask, I’ll say I cleverly made up all the stuff about pillow-fighting. Your secret will be safe with me.”

“Right,” she said, her own sarcasm somehow easing some of her aggravation.

“No,” said Castle, growing more serious again—sincere, in fact. “No pillow fights in the book.”

She nodded once, but the silence proved insufficient. “Thanks,” she said, feeling uncomfortable—or too comfortable, which, in effect, was the same thing.

“You’re welcome,” he replied, sounding a little less like he was accepting her gratitude and a little more like he was bringing her into his home. “Well, I should let you go,” he said, heading for the front door. Giving her an out.

She took it.

* * *

There weren’t nearly enough scenes in movies and books set in theatre projection rooms. That was her excuse for sending Nikki Heat and Jameson Rook there, allowing them to find it unoccupied and arousing; the very idea of letting a steamy scene begin to unfold on the opposite side of the projector was making it difficult for Nikki and Rook to resist embodying it. One exhibitionist notch above making a home movie, really.

Kate sat up in bed, notebook on her lap, pen scratching away at the paper. She hadn’t gotten home until well after midnight, and even though it had been such a long day, she was beyond wired. After half an hour of yoga and a shower, she caved to the notebook’s allure; took it off of her bedside table and didn’t even think as she first set down the words.

By this point, Nikki had been through a lot more than the recent soirée in the wine cellar: the basics of an investigation, a strictly-business scene or two with an old flame who’d always liked sprinkles, a training session with Don where Nikki managed not to mention Rook’s name at all.

But sooner or later, everything came back to Rook: Rook and his lips and his tongue and his hands and his—arms. And yes, fine, everything below the waist.

Fine.

_Fine._

Everyone knew that appreciating the assets of fictional characters didn’t count for anything.

And then the characters went and screwed it all up—got into an argument that had them pulling up pants and straightening shirts and wiggling into shoes.

(Rook, you dumbass, what did you do now?)

_Nikki poked her head out the door and made her escape while Rook was still struggling with his second shoe. He left them both unlaced as he poked his own head out and pursued her._

_“I can explain,” he called after her._

Her pen stopped of its own accord. The melody of Hayley Blue’s song was still so fresh in her mind: _I can explain if you’re listening._

She had an involuntary urge to toss the book in the wastebasket nearby, but stopped herself mid-motion.

Wordlessly, without much thought about what it all meant, Kate put down the pen, kicked off her blanket and made her way through the living room to the bookshelf beside the front door of her apartment. Then she jammed the notebook between a few hardbound mystery novels where it could not be readily seen; out of sight, and, more importantly, away from the privacy and intimacy of her bedroom.

There, on the wooden bureau just beneath the shelves, was a copy of a hefty book that she had brought home on a whim the other day. She picked it up and took it to bed, placing it on her bedside table as she turned off the lamp and tried to catch a few hours of sleep.

The binding was stylized, classic; red and metallic gold; the title in large letters opposite the author’s name.

GRIN

Vince Minaret.

* * *

“Hey,” said Alexis, coming into the kitchen in the morning and settling in on one of the stools at the counter. “I forgot to tell you something.”

“Yeah?” Castle set a plate of hot eggs and buttered toast in front of her, leaning down on folded arms to approximate her height.

“Yeah,” she said, “and last night would have been a good time to do it, so I could tell you and Detective Beckett.” She took a bite of food but paused to say more. “You know, how nice it was that you two went to look for Skye that night. How you didn’t just let her go or leave her hanging because you’d made an arrest and you thought the case was done.”

“Well.” Castle smiled. “I have my moments.”

“Detective Beckett’s pretty great, too.”

He gave a little nod; found himself at an atypical loss for a quip. He was _aquipical._ All right, he thought, at least that satisfied his inner need for humor. But coming up empty in the conversation, other than a too-casual “Yeah,” he turned to the stove and went about serving up another plate of breakfast.

Alexis’ voice followed him there. “You’ll tell her, right?” She must have sensed his hesitation, because she didn’t wait long before adding: “That I appreciate you guys looking out for Skye, not turning away from her.”

“Sure. Yeah,” he replied, finding a bit more pep in his voice in the midst of the sincere promise. “I’ll tell her.”

And it was surely in that moment that Castle came to a realization about Kate Beckett: It was never going to be any easier to turn her away than it had been to leave Skye out there alone.

He heard the memory of their parting the night before; how he’d seen yet another side of her, an innocently secret and unprintable side of her; how he’d given her an out. How he should let her go. Let her get back, he’d silently supplied, to her life without him.

 _I’ll let you go, Kate,_ he imagined telling her instead, _but I will not let you go._

He wasn’t sure that he could if he tried.


	6. Listen

It took a while to sink in, but as Castle set about writing his second Nikki Heat novel, he began to understand Beckett’s distaste for Danishes.

Operating in Active Story Mode, he was paying that much more attention around the bullpen and in the field—wondering if things had always been this obvious and he’d just been too dense to see it, or if people were just making less of an effort to fly under the radar these days.

She may not have articulated it very well until a few weeks ago, when that metaphorical pastry war came out of left field (and even then, he would use the term “articulate” rather loosely), but still it remained true: Beckett had been able to identify the situation as early as the book launch, and even long before.

 _Do you have any idea how much_ grief _I’ve had to put up with over this Nikki Heat thing?_

All right, he’d been dense.

He’d refused to acknowledge the gravity of that _grief_ as anything besides the well-deserved attention he thought it to be. In reality, there were snickers and jabs. One witness asked mid-interview, _“Are you two together?”_ albeit to make a point, but then another called her Castle’s girlfriend instead of respecting her first as a detective. Colleagues commented about how close she seemed to be to her shadow. And then there were the signs that some of the other cops felt a bit underappreciated. Even when they said nothing, sometimes people looked at Beckett as if to wonder exactly what she did to get a heroic role in a mystery series and a flattering spread in Cosmo.

And since he and Beckett hadn’t spent any time together outside of their investigations ever since the awkward concert/movie night/pillow fight fiasco (lately the few times he asked, she said that she was “busy”), he expended that sort of time and energy on his novel-in-progress, typing at his laptop in his empty office, listening to what Nikki Heat had to say.

She certainly wanted to be heard.

_“What the hell do I have to do to get through to you?”_

He remembered how sharp and angular Beckett’s gestures had been when she ranted passionately about Austria and Denmark; how she had pointed at the ground beneath her and then at him; how he’d felt a little wounded by her body language even as he struggled to follow her metaphor and comprehend her frustration. Nikki would be just as passionate, but she wasn’t going to pussyfoot around.

_She poked her finger in the air, punctuating her words with a stab. “I do not, do not, want to be in your article. I do not want to be named, quoted, pictured, or so much as alluded to in your next or any other article.”_

When she accused Rook of not hearing her, he immediately set out to prove to her otherwise, told her point-blank what she had been saying and thinking and feeling all along until she affirmed him.

Despite his ability to script it, Castle didn’t actually know how to have this conversation. But, God help him, he needed to find some way to tell Beckett how badly he wanted to understand her and everything he put her through. If _Heat Wave_ was a love letter gone awry, its sequel was going to be an apology.

* * *

Only one thing could have made the trip from Manhattan to suburban Connecticut any less comfortable: getting stranded on the highway, or abducted and probed by aliens (according to Beckett and Castle, respectively). But it went without saying that they both found the road-trip unworthy of the word “road-trip.”

As they traveled, Castle prodded Beckett again about what was making her so “busy” these days, this time disguising the inquiry in a friendly interest about what was going on in her life rather than an invitation to spend time with him or a possible reason that Alexis shouldn’t be volunteering at the precinct this week. She disclosed nothing.

“By the way,” he said, even though he hadn’t mentioned his daughter out loud, “Alexis told me.”

Beckett looked subtly, strangely panicked for a moment, and he wondered what exactly he _hadn’t_ heard about their private conversation. Just for that, he let the ambiguity hang in the air a moment longer, until Beckett said calmly, “What?”

“About your talk at Sutton’s last week,” he said, trying another ambiguity to see if he could squeeze anything else from her reactions. If there was something she wasn’t telling him, she was doing well at not giving it up.

Of course, he wasn’t entirely forthcoming himself. He conveniently left out the part about why it had all driven him so crazy—not just that Alexis was keeping a secret from him, but that Beckett was effectively stealing his daughter and he didn’t even get to be a part of it. He didn’t tell her how weird it had felt for Alexis to be out with a woman who was not his ex-wife. And he wisely didn’t describe the frustration of knowing that offering Beckett _sex for intel_ was not the viable option that it had once been in similar situations with his exes.

“I’m the Cool Dad,” he announced instead, confidence fully restored. “Not only did she tell me; she chose _me_ over France. She’d rather spend time with me.”

“I know, Castle. That’s nice.”

 _That’s nice? That’s nice_ is what people say when they aren’t really listening to you and they want a fifty-fifty shot at saying the right thing during the conversational gaps. _All hail the Queen of Ambiguity!_

The allure of a Beckett Mystery got the better of him again and he couldn’t hold back. “Just tell me this,” he said, attempting to sound just ambivalent enough that it wouldn’t come off as desperate begging, “is it busy-business or busy-pleasure?”

The facial expression she gave in response was decidedly not one that would answer that question. He pressed his lips together and let his eyes wander back to the windshield.

* * *

After she shut him down, they exhausted their dead-guy-in-the-trash case-talk. Castle’s particular attention to the victim’s double life coming on the heels of their Beckett-centric conversation was not lost on her, and this time, instead of playing to his theorizing, she reminded him very practically that they needed evidence and a chance to look Helen in the eye as they questioned her again.

Then they lived inside their own heads—the rest of the way there and much of the way back.

Beckett had finally started reading _Grin,_ the book by Vince Minaret that she’d picked up on a whim—not entirely unlike the author himself. For once she sort of wished that Castle was driving the car so she could be using these long hours on the road to read.

When she tired of reconsidering their case from every conceivable angle (Castle didn’t need to know that she still theorized alone in her head), she thought about what she’d been reading lately.

The title character was a roguish Russian guy living at the turn of the twentieth century. He loved reading as much as he loved writing. His favorites were Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne, and he even carried a picture of Edgar Allan Poe with him wherever he went.

He’d gotten into a lot of trouble as a kid, a trend that didn’t end with his schooling. At 12, he was kicked out of class for writing a satirical poem about teachers. By the time the Revolution rolled in, the rebel was a 37-year-old with a novella-length rap sheet and a decade of published work under his belt. He’d graduated from rude poetry to controversial pieces that the government confiscated. He’d escaped from drafted service in the army, nearly escaped from prison with the help of his revolutionary-friend Katherine Bibergal, and had been exiled twice—and yes, escaped that, too. After his divorce, he joked that he had even escaped his marriage to his ex-wife Vera Abramova.

Sometimes he sounded like an adventurous hero, and sometimes he sounded like a fantastic jackass.

Beckett didn’t know yet whether she liked him, but she did find him interesting.

* * *

“Castle,” she said, during their evening excursion back to Connecticut, courtesy of a fiancée/wife catfight that only one of them was eager to witness for himself. “We need to talk.”

His eyes widened, but he kept his voice cool, chancing only a brief glance in her direction. “It is well recorded in the annals of history that no good has ever come to a man when a woman said, ‘We need to talk.’ But,” he added, suddenly entertaining the idea of a number of honest declarations he wouldn’t mind hearing from her, “do feel free to change the course of history.”

“The _good_ in your case is that you’ll live,” said Beckett. “I mean we need to talk this time. It’s getting late and this is getting to be a lot of driving for one day.”

“We can switch places,” he offered eagerly. “You can rest while I drive.” Castle would seize any excuse to get into the driver’s seat. Having Beckett trust him enough not only to give him the wheel but to fall asleep in the passenger seat beside him would only be an added bonus.

“In your dreams,” she said.

“No, see, _I_ would be awake.”

“Just make yourself useful and keep _me_ awake.”

He couldn’t tell if she had any idea of the potency of what she’d just said. He couldn’t tell because he was temporarily stunned into oblivion, into a fantastic world where he could do exactly as she asked, exactly as he wished. He imagined leaning over and running his hand along the inseam from her knee to her thigh, kissing her shoulder and forging a path to her neck. Oh, she would be stoic at first, but eventually she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore and they’d pull over somewhere and—

“ _Castle_ ,” she warned, as though she knew.

“Did you finish _Heat Wave?”_ he asked, groping for something. She hesitated and he grinned. “Twice? More?”

“It was _short,”_ she murmured.

He was nonetheless delighted. “So that would be busy-pleasure, then.”

“And _fast,”_ she said, another misguided attempt at spite.

He ignored her witchy baiting in favor of a new tactic: “Want to know what happens next?”

* * *

She had to admit that she sort of liked getting the exclusive on the next novel. She wouldn’t admit it to _him,_ but he could probably tell anyway.

Castle caught on very quickly that the best way to capture Beckett’s interest was to talk about the twists in the case that Nikki was investigating and not about her complicated relationship with Rook. Not that she wasn’t curious about that, too.

But the invention of an entire case was so thoroughly beyond her. After all, she didn’t start a given investigation with a blank slate. She couldn’t help becoming invested in the details that Castle had worked out so far and theorizing how it might all come together.

He regaled her as though he had already finished the story, letting it unfold as cinematically as his words and gesticulations would allow. He watched to gauge her reactions and listened to her guesses. Of course, he managed to leave off at a cliffhanger by the time they got to Helen Parker’s yard.

On the way home again that night, they easily slipped back into the roles of the storyteller and the active listener, until Castle became preoccupied with a few gaps in his plot and some ideas that he hadn’t sorted out how to include. Then he acted as though they were co-conspirators. Since she had no means of escape for at least another twenty miles, she went along on his digression.

“Something else I left out: I really like the body-snatching,” he continued. “You know, book-wise. Not body-wise. That was unfortunate. But it’s so _gritty,_ and now that I know that it’s _possible?_ Gold.”

“Just try not to make the OCME look bad,” said Beckett, managing a smile.

“I know,” he said, upon an epiphany worth the appearance of his notebook. “I’ll put Ochoa in the van with Lauren. He can be a badass with the body-snatchers.”

“Good,” she agreed. “More dramatic that way. Better than Rook just sitting there.” It was the first time in a while that either of them had mentioned Jameson Rook, and she almost bit her tongue because of that alone.

Castle narrowed his eyes at her, and she knew without having to turn her head. She smiled.

“Now,” he said, “about the Ludlows. How obvious do you think it will be that they’re pseudo-Wellesleys? I mean, how recognizable can any given scandalous politician really be?”

She looked at him looking at her, silent and still. In hindsight, she could have said nothing and waited to see how long he would have lasted. But she said: “I’m sorry. Did you want a serious answer?”

* * *

It wasn’t until after the case that Kate had enough time to read for leisure. When she finally picked up where she left off with _Grin,_ she found him walking down the street toward home, admiring the St. Isaac Cathedral and the Mariinsky Theater in a way that he never had. He had seen the architecture thousands of times before, but it was as though he saw them now for the first time.

He was irrevocably in love with his new wife, Nina. She distracted him—no, she inspired him. He saw everything anew.

Kate sank down onto the bed, pulling up the blanket and resting the heavy red book on her lap.

_Nina sat comfortably, reading the last novel her husband had published._

_“How many times have you read this?” he teased. “Surely you know by now how it ends.”_

_Nina tore her eyes from the page to greet her husband with a kiss. “I do know,” she told him. “And I still love finding out all over again.” She turned to the first page and traced her slender fingers over the words there: Presented and dedicated to Nina Nikolayevna Grin. She closed the book, took his hand in hers, and rose to walk with him, playfully nudging him with her shoulder. “I love that you make the impossible happen. Prophecies. Ships with scarlet sails. . . .”_

Kate paused with a flash of insight, a memory. She scrambled out of the sheet, set the open book down on the night table to hold her place, and quickly crossed her apartment.

She went to her collection of books in the front entrance, thumbed through the bindings until she found it: _Scarlet Sails._ And there it was, as plain as anything, the dedication inside: _Presented and dedicated to Nina Nikolayevna Grin by the Author. November 23, 1922. Petrograd. ___

__She remembered traces of the story from when she had read it years ago. Not a lot of it stood out to her now, and she realized that was probably because she’d had such an emotional reaction to the first part._ _

__It began with Longren. Longren was a sailor, already quite withdrawn from society, simply by nature. He returned from months at sea to discover that his wife had died; came home to an infant he’d never known, a little girl left temporarily in another woman’s care after his dear wife’s death. Longren lovingly raised his daughter, Assol, but as grief overtook their home and gossip overtook their town, they became all the more isolated._ _

__Kate vividly remembered this part of the story because it was soon after Johanna Beckett’s death that she had read it. At the time, her father was more immersed in alcohol than in his daughter’s young adulthood. While anyone else who read the story would become enamored with Assol’s adventures—the impossibility of a real ship with scarlet sails becoming a reality that swept her away—Kate was forever lost in Chapter One. As a reader, she ached for Longren. As a daughter who felt as though she’d just been orphaned twice, she coveted his steadfast love for Assol._ _

__But that was a decade ago, and they say that you can hear something new every time you listen to the same song; that you can see new things in old stories when you read them again—especially when you wait so many years in between._ _

__So, for the first time, Kate read _Scarlet Sails_ not as a tale of a motherless child but as a story about hope and miracles, about trusting and waiting. It was a story of the romance between adult Assol and the clever Arthur Gray, who knew how people ridiculed Assol’s childish belief and took it upon himself to make the fantastic scarlet sails a realized dream._ _

__It was a love letter from Alexander Grin to Nina Nikolayevna, published for anyone to see, dedicated especially to her._ _


	7. A Reason Why

She saw him coming. That was the most embarrassing part about the whole thing.

She’d just delegated tasks to Detectives Ryan and Esposito, and she was all set to get herself a cup of coffee before heading in to speak with Doc Holloway and their amnesiac witness.

Just as she rounded the corner of the desk, she saw Castle. Being an expert eyewitness herself, Beckett only needed the two fleeting seconds she had to take in his flattering jacket and dark button-down and one mug in each hand and—was he _ogling_ her?

It was the second time in as many days that she’d caught him looking at someone’s boobs. Late last night, Mrs. Fink had gripped her own prosthetics at Castle’s eyelevel and demanded in her Brooklyn brogue: _“What am I gonna do with these?”_ Somehow Castle had managed to keep his mouth shut, but Beckett caught his cat-that-ate-the-canary look at the woman’s saucy outburst.

This look was different. This look was—appreciative? And it felt kind of good. It felt kind of—

 _Hot!_ Nearly two mugs’ worth of hot liquid splashed across Beckett’s cleavage, stinging her skin as the thin white fabric clung to her.

Eyewitness skills: Intact. Reflexes: Oddly weak.

* * *

They both grunted when they collided, and Castle stood stock-still at the realization of what he had done. He sort of just assumed it was his fault; couldn’t blame her for distracting him—and she _had_ been his distraction. Now all words were suddenly beyond him except for the phrase that he’d been rehearsing in his head for the past two minutes: “I brought you coffee.”

He couldn’t make out just how sincere she was when she responded with some difficulty, “Thank you, Castle,” and pushed past him.

“You’re not gonna help clean up, bro?” asked Esposito, still sitting in Castle’s usual seat on the other end of the desk. Ryan stood behind him and backed him up with a smirk. They watched as Castle moved to set the mugs down on the desk; at the last moment, he decided that they were far too messy to put down so close to important documents and retreated.

Without a word to the boys, he shuffled back to the break room, bearing the lingering pain of the hot coffee on his hands all the way to the sink. There he relinquished the mugs and ran cold water over himself. It wasn’t that long before he was able to withdraw his hands, and he thought guiltily of how much more it must have hurt Beckett; wondered how quickly she was able to remove her top _(not like that)_ and if cold water would be enough to soothe her own burn.

When she emerged in a fresh purple turtleneck and her brown leather jacket, he was relieved that she’d had a spare shirt in her locker, but neither of them said a word about the incident. In fact, as they hurried over to join Doc Holloway and the amnesiac literature buff, she never even met Castle’s eye.

Was she just that upset about their crash, he wondered, or was there another reason?

* * *

Later that afternoon, Esposito and Ryan left to pick up Jay (their friendly amnesiac’s temporary name) from St. Vincent’s and take him back to the art gallery in Chelsea with the hope of sparking his memory.

Beckett stayed behind to puzzle at the murder board, perched on the edge of the desk; Castle came along and faithfully perched beside her.

Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry.”

She only nodded.

He leaned over to nudge her arm with his, looked her way just in case she looked back. “This is the part where you say, ‘Don’t be. Coffee stains suit me. It’s an improvement.’ And declare us even. You know, because of that time—Poe?”

No response? _Why?_

He became agitated at that, desperate to make amends with bribery or humor or whatever would work. “Can I make it up to you? Can I get you another coffee now and _promise_ not to pour it on you?”

“No,” she gently replied, “I’m fine.” She exhaled deeply and wiped her brow with the back of one hand—and, come to think of it, she looked just a little bit flushed.

“Are you too warm?” he asked. “You’ve got two heavy layers. Why don’t you take off your—” 

_Coat._ He’d meant to say ‘coat.’

But an epiphany hit him mid-sentence, then and there, and it tumbled out in a scandalized hiss: “You’re not wearing a bra!” He couldn’t help it; his facial expression quickly cycled from innocent shock to inescapable arousal.

At that, she came alive. She shushed him and gave a surreptitious glance around the bullpen, hissing back: “Would you shut up!”

“Oh, my God,” said Castle, his Common Sense Filter failing him. “You really aren’t, are you?”

Frankly, her outfit had been more revealing with the white button-down that was just opaque enough to hide her white bra (and not so opaque that Castle had needed to theorize its color). But this purple turtleneck and this brown leather jacket were going to tease him for the rest of the day, not to mention whenever she wore either of them again.

“Soaked through,” she murmured. “Are you happy now?”

Castle pointedly did _not_ look down at his lap. He looked up at the ceiling and pursed his lips. “No—I’m still sorry.”

“Good,” said Beckett, standing and walking away.

Glutton for punishment? Maybe. With a roguish smile, he called after her: “I just want to be supportive.”

Nikki would have flipped the bird at this point, but Beckett groaned without turning around, just kept on walking. She told him she needed a drink of water to cool down. From the warmth of two layers or the heat of exasperation, she didn’t say.

But Castle was fighting a greater distraction: figuring out how he was going to survive the next few hours knowing that Beckett was braless at work. Because of him.

No wonder she’d hardly looked him in the eye all day.

(And the next morning, Beckett bought her own coffee on her way to the Twelfth.)

* * *

The night that they arrested Jeremy Prestwick—their now identified amnesiac whose apartment turned out to hold the murder weapon—Richard Castle did not sleep well.

He and Jeremy had little in common, really, but Castle had already begun to relate to him quite a bit. The guy was likeable, at least, and it was hard not to be sympathetic to his situation from the get-go. What had sounded to Castle like living out a beloved television trope turned into an invaluable quest to sort out a human life, as satisfying as any mystery that Castle had solved or written. And he didn’t like this sudden twist that his first amnesiac friend was actually _guilty_ of something like murder.

Even more than that, though, it bothered Castle that Jeremy still didn’t have his memory, let alone a reason why he’d done what he did. The name and face of Victor Fink meant nothing to him. Jeremy’s whole life, which he still couldn’t remember, meant nothing to him, and now he could end up spending the rest of it in prison.

Soon after Castle finally did manage to get to sleep, he woke with a start from a nightmare—that he himself had been arrested for murder with no memory of why he’d killed someone. It jolted him to such an uneasy wakefulness that he put on a robe and sat at the desk in his office to write.

Maybe working on that next Nikki Heat novel would help get his mind off this case, especially if he tried really hard not to give any of the characters amnesia. (It was tempting, but he stayed strong. He wrote about the mob instead.)

After he’d gotten a few pages’ worth out of his system, he felt his mind winding down a little and returned to his bedroom. By the time he slipped beneath the blanket, he was thinking again about not dwelling on the case, which made him think about Beckett, because Beckett could dwell.

He hoped she wasn’t dwelling as much as he was tonight.

The only reason why he didn’t call her was the thought that, if she _was_ asleep, he didn’t want to ruin it for her. But he missed her enough that she came to him in his dreams.

Braless. Naturally.

_Kate._

This time she was wearing that white button-down of hers, and—oh, God—kissing him, all the while letting him unbutton her one little inch at a time.

“Kate,” he murmured into her mouth, just because he could do that here and she would only urge him on all the more. “Mm, Kate.”

When the shirt finally hung loosely on her, he drifted into it and sought out her bare flesh with teeth and tongue, and she burned beneath him.

No, really—the smooth, beautiful skin of her chest became inexplicably scorched and raw, and the more he tried to soothe the wounds with tender kisses, the more she whimpered and sobbed in pain. The only things he found worse than enduring his helplessness were witnessing her trauma and knowing he’d had something to do with it.

Covered in sweat and panicking as though immersed in a true blaze, he woke. He tore off his own T-shirt, tossed it away, and then kicked off the blankets in a desperate attempt to turn down the heat in his haunted bed.

He had hurt Beckett. In so many different ways now.

* * *

Fresh off his divorce from his first wife, Vera, Grin began a story about a man called Nok who liked to say things like: “When a woman is asleep, she can’t do any harm.”

Grin may have been a little bitter.

But even then, several years before he ever crossed paths with Nina Nikolayevna and she turned his world inside out, Grin had something of an optimistic streak when it came to love and magic and miracles. Even Nok, the man who claimed he had a dead soul, fell deeply in love with a sincere and open-hearted woman named Gelli, whose love did nothing less than save him. In their story, they parted for a while, but afterwards they came together never to part again. They lived for a long time and died on the same day, a fate that Alexander Grin reserved for couples with profound love. He believed in that kind of love; believed it was real, whether or not he’d ever live to experience it himself.

Vera had never understood why her husband couldn’t write a “realistic” novel. Grin had never understood how Vera couldn’t see all that was real in what he wrote. She put up with his illegal activities and the long years of his exile, but she could not bear the heart of his imagination. He had wanted for _them_ to be magic together, but if Vera didn’t believe in the possibility of magic, she would never believe in them the way that he did. It was what he needed to realize before he could move on.

Marrying Nina Nikolayevna several years later meant far more to Alexander Grin than a second chance. She was new life; the embodiment of all the magic he’d believed was real all along.

She had a refreshing youthfulness about her—yes, he was 41 and she 27 when they married in 1921, but her youth was more a matter of spirit than of age, as was his, and that was why they understood that so well about one another.

She loved his playfulness, his vivid imagination. She’d search for weeks for the perfect name for a character in one of his short stories. Only when they’d found the right one were they done. She was relentless in her investigating. And it wasn’t just for his sake; she cared about the people in the stories. Identifying these people properly became a series of puzzles that she wanted to help him solve. 

He loved all that about her, but what he loved even more was the strength of her heart. He had a million examples to draw on—the way she treated loved ones and strangers alike, the way she never gave up on anyone in trouble. He once watched her care for a wounded hawk; could barely breathe at the sight of her compassion.

The day that they arrived at their new home in Feodosiya, Ukraine, where they would live by the sea that he loved so dearly, he composed a letter to his wife of three years and slipped the folded paper into the pocket of his trousers. As they wandered the shoreline of the Black Sea, hand-in-hand, he discreetly took the letter from his pocket into his empty palm. Then, when they reached the farthest point of their journey and turned toward home, he took her other hand in his, letting her palm close over the small paper as they walked.

_“What’s this?” she asked._

_“A story,” he teased, watching her as she unfolded it._

The letter was short, but its contents spanned their life together thus far, recounting what he had thought when he’d first met her and what a difference she had made in his life already.

 _“You gave me so much happiness, love, tenderness, and even good reasons to change my attitude to life,”_ he wrote, _“that I stand here now as if amidst flowers and waves with a flock of birds above my head. In my heart there is joy and light.”_

* * *

Kate saw a woman reading on the beach. The woman looked just the way that Kate always imagined Nina Nikolayevna to look, except rather modernized and Americanized. Between the swimsuit and sunglasses, the beach umbrella, the chaise lounge, and various accoutrements around her, Nina may as well have been hanging out at the Hamptons in the twenty-first century.

And then it didn’t matter so much what the woman looked like, because Kate saw the rest of the dream through the woman’s eyes. She glanced up from the book to see a man—could it be Grin?—throwing a red Frisbee for the sleek brown dog romping in the waves. As the dog returned victorious, the man crouched down on one knee to shower her with praise, petting her head and taking the Frisbee to throw it again over the sunlit sea.

The next time that Kate looked up from her beach reading, she discovered that the splashing that she’d expected to be the brown dog was now the playful splashing of a small, sandy-haired child wading in the shallow waters. The child shrieked with delight and kicked up spray after spray of droplets, chasing a toy ship with brilliant scarlet sails while the man laughed and played along.

She could see neither man nor child very clearly, and yet they were so real to her—even familiar.

But Nina and Grin didn’t have pets or children, as far as Kate knew. Certainly not at this point in Vince Minaret’s book—

—which Kate woke to find beside her on her bed. She’d fallen asleep while reading, dropping the book closed, but she remembered well enough where she had left off. She had been reading for a week or two now about Nina and Grin’s years of marriage, which lately was really bringing out Kate’s romantic side. She’d had marriage on the brain all week, even before her silly banter with Castle about him proposing to the dog on the sidewalk and whether or not she was his “work wife” (which she wasn’t).

 _Grin_ was making her soft, she decided. She set the book aside, turned out the lamp, and tried to get back to sleep.

There she found Castle—the image still unclear to her, and yet in this dream, it was at least unmistakable that it was Castle.

He was also unmistakably naked.


	8. The Other Book

Castle was posing nude.

For _her._

He stood casually, naturally, his face looking off to the side just enough that she could see the solid lines of his jaw and nose, but not quite in profile. She stood nearby at an easel with charcoal in hand, trying to draw the man who was her shadow. She managed a rough outline, but even in her dreams, she was not so skilled with inner details. If only she could see him more clearly, she thought, maybe she could better translate the image to the page.

A few strokes with the charcoal at his emerging manhood jerked Kate awake again.

It was easy enough to explain away this dream, though; after all, she’d made that off-handed comment about nudity to Ryan when Castle was posing for Jeremy Prestwick to test his artistic ability. She ignored her desire to see her model more clearly—naked or otherwise—and focused instead on the lack of clarity itself. Sometimes when she faced perplexing cases or solved a case that still somehow _felt_ unresolved, she’d dream that she wasn’t able to see something, anything, clearly.

It really did bother her that they never figured out why Jeremy was at the gallery and what made him a murderer. She busied her mind with thoughts of the case, spending much of the night going back over the details and hoping that she’d discover something that could make it make sense.

* * *

Castle found Ryan and Esposito in the break room, preparing coffee at the cappuccino machine that he’d bought for the Twelfth.

“Can I ask you guys something?” he said, hands in his pockets, glancing over his shoulder to be sure that Beckett was out of earshot. “What’d you really think of _Heat Wave?”_

Ryan hesitated. “You really wanna know?”

“Well, yeah,” said Castle, trying to sound sure. “And I don’t just mean as a book. I mean Raley and Ochoa, and how they’re kind of based on you? And how Nikki is front-and-center? Be honest. Be brutal. You don’t resent Beckett, do you?”

“Nah,” said Esposito, exchanging a look with Ryan, who nodded in agreement. “We don’t blame Beckett.”

“Oh, good.” The writer breathed a sigh of relief.

“But to be honest,” Esposito continued, “we are pretty pissed at you.”

Instantly, both cops drew their weapons and aimed them at Castle, who threw up his hands in surrender. “Whoa! What . . .?”

Ryan answered the dangling question: “There just doesn’t seem to be any other way to get rid of you.”

“Yo, Castle. Where’s your writer vest now?”

And just like that, they fired. The impact of the shots knocked Castle backward off his feet. He could feel the piercing sharpness in his flesh, and an unusual sting of coldness there that he hadn’t expected, and then his world went dark.

* * *

When Castle opened his eyes, he was lying on his back on a slab in the morgue, his naked body covered from the waist down with a thin sheet. His whole body felt cold, but there was an extra tickle to his toes that made him realize they must be uncovered, too.

Detective Beckett stood over him, looking him over as clinically as she looked over any dead guy. As she spoke, she addressed only the M.E.: “Anything new on the cause of death?”

“Hey, I’m still here!” he protested, but clearly as far as Beckett and Lanie were concerned, he was really dead and hadn’t made a sound.

Lanie gestured at Castle with a pink-gloved hand. “Whatever left these holes in him is gone. No sign that they were dug out of him. But get this—I found water in the wounds.”

“Ice bullets!” said Beckett. “Ingenious.”

“And impossible to trace,” Lanie added.

Just past the women, he saw two slightly oversized fleas with humanoid faces sitting on the counter—they were Ryan and Esposito, and at the M.E.’s explanation, they laughed wickedly and high-fived each other with their little insect legs. As they hurried away, Beckett and Lanie headed for the door and left Castle to come to grips with his predicament and the sterile silence of his solitude.

Then he sat up on the slab to discover that someone was, in fact, still in the room with him: that little brown dog from their case sat on her hindquarters right there in the morgue, as though waiting for him to awaken before a morning walk. “Lucy?” he said, finding his voice despite the lump in his throat.

“Ricky,” the dog replied in some sort of telepathy or ventriloquism, her lips remaining still but her head cocked to the side.

“You can hear me? And . . . answer me?”

“Of course.”

His mind was racing with all of this: waking up dead in the morgue, a talking dog whose voice reminded him of Lucille Ball and—oh, _I Love Lucy._ Ricky Ricardo. Was he Ricky Ricardo now? He spotted a reflective surface and saw just clearly enough that he was still Richard Castle. But that still left him with more questions than answers. Something in his dream-gut told him to go with the flow. “Uh—hi?” he said, immediately needing to lick his dry lips.

Meanwhile, Lucy looked serene, like this conversation was the most natural thing in the world for her. “You should have known what you were getting yourself into, writing like that.”

He nodded slowly, thinking about the reactions to _Heat Wave from_ everyone who was not a crazed fan or a critic (craziness implied by definition). He ran a hand over his skin and recalled the ice bullets that had landed him on this slab in the morgue. “Because I’d make people angry?” he asked.

“No,” said the dog, tilting her head to the other side, “because you made a knockoff of Kate, a forgery of the original, and look where it got you. You’re holding onto something fake while holding out for something real. That’s why you’re dead.”

Castle chewed on that for a second, and said, “You seem awfully wise for a dog.”

Lucy’s eyes warmed. “Just how many dogs have spoken to you?”

“You’re right,” said Castle. “I guess I have no means of comparison. Hey, by the way,” he added, “do you know how to use a toilet? My daughter won’t let us get a dog unless I can find one that can use the toilet.”

Lucy’s little jowls formed an unmistakable smile, one that showed her bologna-pink tongue and the tips of her teeth. “Two words, Rick: plastic baggy.”

Well, he thought, maybe Alexis would think the talking thing was cool enough.

When he woke this time he was very cold, and he burrowed back into his blankets, still bare-chested but too stubborn to go in search of the T-shirt he’d discarded earlier.

He thought back to that first night at Victor Fink’s gallery, when the team had first reported to the scene. After they’d determined that the fifth bullet was missing and Beckett had slipped away to speak with CSU, Castle had pulled Ryan and Esposito aside, just one small attempt to make amends for whatever damage his book had done.

Privately but nevertheless point-blank, he’d asked them in reality: “What did you think of _Heat Wave?”_

“Whoa.” Esposito raised his hands in front of him as though refusing a second helping of dinner. “Dude, I don’t do reviews.”

Ryan gave a casual shrug. “I liked it. Why?”

“So you’re okay with it?” Castle pressed, hovering in their personal space to keep his voice very low, and only backing off a little when Esposito gave him a look. “You’re not upset with me?”

Ryan glanced at his partner and then answered Castle: “No. Why would we be?”

“Hey, if you had any reason to worry,” said Esposito, his voice and demeanor surprisingly gentle, “we would’ve let you know.”

By then, Beckett was waiting for him to go with her to the precinct. “Castle, you coming or what?”

Esposito caught his attention once more before he left. “But could you maybe give Ochoa something badass to do in the next one?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Castle assured him, starting to follow after Beckett. “There will be badassery.”

After that, they teased him mercilessly about his concerns whenever they were alone, and even when Beckett was around, they didn’t hold back from ribbing each other. The ice bullets in Castle’s nightmare had pained him, but bantering about ice holes with the guys the other night had been a playful reassurance to him that he was still part of the team. He’d pretended to be insulted, but he’d actually liked the levity.

Even though it went unstated, it was the first time he felt a little bit included in the phrase Brothers in Blue.

* * *

The rest of Kate’s dream life for the night was safely realistic, the images notably clear and the details straightforward, as though she’d coerced her own sub-consciousness into thinking things she could handle. But that didn’t mean she was any less concerned about her “unresolved solved.”

In their last case, Sam Parker had died for a cause he’d believed in. No matter what Jeremy’s original motive, it seemed now that Victor Fink had died for no reason at all.

When she and Castle saw Jeremy in his cell earlier tonight, she’d found herself preoccupied with the sign posted behind him as though seeing it for the first time: “NOTICE: Do not give anything to the inmates.”

The only thing Beckett wanted to give him was the peace of mind about why he’d killed a man. It was the first time she wanted to offer closure as much to the offender as to the victim’s family. In some ways, Jeremy had seemed even more sympathetic to her than Mrs. Fink. Given her usual values and inclinations, that was all a little difficult to reconcile.

 _Kate_ needed closure.

And where did she go when she wanted to understand these things? Why people do what they do, why they are the way that they are?

She turned on her bedside lamp and dug through the pile of books on the table. Past _Grin_ and _Scarlet Sails_ and _Heat Wave_ she found one of Richard Castle’s earlier novels—the one she’d waited in line for an hour to have him sign. She’d kept it close, and tonight she delved back into its pages to help her wrestle with all of the uncertainties tugging at her mind.

* * *

When Castle finally returned to the loft after their case was closed—for real this time—Martha was there to call her son out for his walk of shame. Turnabout, and all that.

“I was with Beckett,” Castle said, which egged Martha on all the more, so he clarified: “Wrapping up a case.”

Martha rolled her eyes. “You should kiss that girl while you’re both young.”

As though the idea had never occurred to him.

But instead of bantering with her or indulging in the images that the suggestion conjured up, Castle popped a squat beside his mother on the sofa and listened to her explain the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her—the boutonniere that Chet had saved ever since their high school prom only to send to Martha now to ask her for a second chance.

A dead flower had never seemed so sweet.

Castle meant what he said to her that morning: that the flower’s time had come and gone, but Martha’s had not; that she should truly live, even though risking her heart like this scared her more than anything. It was about her and Chet, not about the desiccated petals on the coffee table.

But later, Castle couldn’t stop thinking about those desiccated petals, tucked away for decades before being repurposed like that. His mother received it not just as a gift but as a sign, the same way that Emma Carns had believed that her ex-husband Jeremy Prestwick might still have feelings for her when she recognized their special painting still on display in his apartment. Castle believed in both gifts and signs.

If only there was something he could do or say or give to Beckett that would be a sign, a reason why she could trust him and like him and give him even a first chance.

But they had no past together, like Chet and Martha, or Emma and Jeremy, so he couldn’t give her anything he’d preserved and held close all this time. They had never even met until Beckett came along mid-investigation on the Alison Tisdale case. Without a shared past, he could only draw from the present. What could he possibly do besides keep writing to her, keep working alongside her, keep hanging around in the hope that one day she would see him?

He didn’t know yet what else, if anything, he could or would do, but he decided then and there that he would find a way to earn Beckett’s trust—and, maybe someday, even more than that.


	9. The Dedication

It was the Saturday before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, because Richard Castle was pretending to be strapped to a chair.

Eventually, his daughter found him sitting at the edge of the living room, his eyes squeezed tight, his lips pressed together, his hands and feet straining against imaginary bonds.

He opened his eyes when he heard her footfalls; murmured urgently at her as though his mouth were actually incapacitated with tape.

She paused and assessed his predicament. “Good guy or bad guy?”

He stilled his straining movements and looked at Alexis with a serious expression that told her that it should be obvious from his performance that he was playing the role of a sympathetic hero.

Alexis humored him and pulled off the imaginary tape at her father’s mouth. “You were saying?”

Castle gave an exaggerated gasp for air. “Thanks,” he said, wiggling a little—just enough to keep his circulation going without breaking the illusion of his captivity. “I think I need your help. This isn’t working psychologically.”

She smiled and gently sassed: “Psychological help, then?”

“I need you to tape me to the chair.”

“Looks like you’re doing perfectly fine without the real thing.”

“No,” he said. “Pretending sort of works well enough to get into Nikki’s head about how she feels about being in the situation, but it’s not good enough for figuring out how to get her out of it.”

“So you need to get real tape?”

“I need _you_ to get real tape.” At her hesitation, he insisted: “Mentally, I _am_ strapped to the chair. I don’t want to have to start over completely.”

She sighed. “Well, no one can say that you aren’t dedicated.” She patted him on the shoulder on her way out. “I’ll go get it. Don’t move.”

“Ha. I’ll try to restrain myself,” he teased back.

* * *

All of the signs pointed to Kyra.

Not the murdery ones. Well, maybe those, too, but only as far as Beckett was concerned. Rick knew better. He knew Kyra better.

No, all of the signs that mattered pointed to Kyra; all of the kinds of signs that Castle had just recently wished he’d had in his arsenal to woo Beckett.

But it had always been Kyra, hadn’t it?

And Kyra believed in signs, too. He knew she understood.

The fateful interruption of her wedding ceremony. Their paths crossing again by no planning or plotting of their own. The look in her eye when they saw each other in the bridal suite of the Beaumont. Her revelation to him in the ballroom that she’d secretly hoped that he would follow her when she escaped to England all that time ago. This entire idea that nobly respecting her wish for space had parted them for so long—star-crossed lovers who couldn’t make it work—only for their stars to align once again and reunite them now; wiser, stronger, and nevertheless connected.

She’d said it herself. Some people would think what happened to her on her wedding day was a sign. Really, what were the odds that Rick Castle would show up just then, after all these years apart?

Then there were the tangible signs: the hand-written manuscript that he cherished, the photo of them he’d tucked inside it. Like Chet’s old boutonniere and Jeremy’s love-smudged painting, each preserved for years with the memory of a man’s lost love, Rick had held onto his life with Kyra Blaine.

Coming through the unlocked door to the roof to find Kyra standing there, waiting for him and only him; it was all just one more sign that he longed to heed.

“Some things never change,” he told her. And maybe some things that are lost really can be found.

* * *

It was strange how easily things could be lost.

 _How easy,_ Kate thought as she curled up on her sofa that night, _how incredibly easy it is to take something for granted and not even realize it._

After years of providing escapist fantasy to a post-Revolution audience, Alexander Grin fell off literary radar. As Josef Stalin came to power, critics deemed Grin’s works “irrelevant” to the Soviet epoch.

Just like that. Irrelevant. Like an old man told to stop telling silly stories about his so-called glory days, or rather like a child told to leave behind ridiculous notions of make-believe.

He’d already penned hundreds of short stories and several novels, but after 1930, Grin was no longer able to publish, and he and Nina struggled to support themselves. The loss of his public voice and their dire financial situation were only the beginning; Grin soon became ill with cancer, a villain he could not write away.

Just a month before his fifty-second birthday, Alexander Grin died at home, his wife at his side.

When his cold body was taken away to be prepared for burial, Nina clung to the things that she had left to honor the life she’d lost. In the midst of carrying out the usual tasks that a widow with few family members must do for the deceased, she held _Scarlet Sails_ close to her heart, and she realized then that eulogies and epigraphs were rather like dedications to the dead.

* * *

“You know,” Kyra said quietly, still enfolded in Rick’s arms and a little breathless from their kiss, “I nearly had heart failure when I saw that dedication.”

Rick held her more tightly, resting his chin on top of her head. “What do you mean?”

She took a moment, as though she might not answer at all. “In _Heat Wave._ I saw ‘KB,’ and I thought—” Kyra paused, tried again. “It was silly. You never even called me that. And I actually _had_ seen something in a magazine about Detective Beckett and Nikki Heat. Later when I got the book, I just didn’t put it together. I guess I just—”

“You thought it was you,” he said gently, not realizing that, even though Kyra had already known that it wasn’t her, his words made this real for her.

“That maybe you were still thinking of me,” she said, fending off emotion. “That it was some kind of sign—I know it’s silly.”

He opened his embrace just enough to be able to see her looking up at him with tired eyes and a weak smile. “I _have_ been thinking of you,” he told her. “How could I possibly forget you?”

* * *

During the summer between their sophomore and junior years of college, their first summer as a couple, they met often in their special place—their secret roof. While Kyra was taking a couple of courses to beef up her résumé, Rick was working hard on a novel.

That is, when they weren’t making out.

One day, she broke a particularly thorough kiss, still cradling his jaw in her delicate hands, and met his eyes. “Can I tell you something?”

“If you come up for air long enough,” Rick teased.

She bit her lip, slid her hands down to touch the collar of his T-shirt as she gathered herself. Then she went for it: “I’m glad your book didn’t get published right away. It gave me a chance to get to know you just a little before the bestseller.”

It surprised him, honestly. They’d met early in their sophomore year and started dating that winter, not very long after Black Pawn finally published the oft-rejected _In a Hail of Bullets._ Scoring a bestseller in college had gotten Rick a fair amount of attention, and even though he’d already been friendly with Kyra and knew her not to be shallow, part of him believed that much of his appeal hinged on the fame and money.

He’d blown through everything he earned in six months, some of it on wild attempts to impress Kyra, which she kept insisting that he didn’t need to do. She stuck around, faithful as before, when the money was gone and the fame was what it ever was for a one-hit wonder. Kyra encouraged him to keep writing, not for the sake of a paycheck or his reputation, but because she knew how much he loved words and stories and people.

And yet her confession still surprised him.

Not knowing quite what to say, he said, “I didn’t know those few weeks meant that for you.”

She looked bashful for a moment, demure and tender. “They did. But we met once in freshman year, too.”

That was news to him. “Get out. I would have remembered you.”

“The formal,” she said slyly, watching her boyfriend’s reaction as she recounted the story. “I’d found out just that night that my grandfather died. Even my mother said I should stay and enjoy the dance with my friends, but I couldn’t do it. You saw that I was upset and asked my friend and me if we were okay. They were selling flowers for a fundraiser, and just before I left—”

“—I gave you a rose.” The memory brought a sad, gentle smile to his face.

She nodded. “Even as a stranger, you did something sweet for me without expecting anything in return. I liked you already. When I saw you again this year, I had to get to know you. But you have always been that same sweet guy to me.” She rested her palms on his chest, traced his collar bone. “I like this accomplished author, but I liked my mysterious rose man first.”

Rick cleared his throat. “I, uh, I have a confession, too.” They were words that he did not utter frequently or easily, but his girlfriend’s own openness compelled him. “I’m sorry that you never got to fulfill your dream. That you didn’t get into Oxford. And I feel even worse because I’m glad you didn’t,” he said quickly, the syllables tumbling out now. “Because if they’d accepted you, you would have gone there instead, and then I never would have met—”

She cut him off with another kiss, reassurance and understanding and forgiveness wrapped into one gesture; a mutual celebration of the twists of fate that gave them one another. When they parted, she glanced at the notebook he’d brought with him. “What are you working on?”

He smiled; she must have been using the term loosely, because he’d written all of ten words in the time that they’d been up there. “It’s called _Flowers for Your Grave._ I’ve been working on it a while now, but I don’t know. Somehow the second book seems harder than the first.”

“Mm,” she hummed. She patted his arm and made her way back to her own books to study some more. “Guess I should stop distracting you, then.”

* * *

He didn’t finish the book that summer, of course. In fact, he’d been derailed enough that he had to put it aside and start a different one; a practice he did not feel good about indulging, even with only one bestseller under his belt. But at least he was still writing.

They spent that Thanksgiving with Kyra’s family. They’d been together for just under a year, which was already longer than any of Castle’s previous relationships, and he was feeling the pressure. It was the first time that he was meeting the Blaines, and he wanted to make a—well, he didn’t want to fuck it up.

As it turned out, he’d done that long before he got to the front door.

Sheila Blaine had his number. Relentlessly she grilled Rick over dinner: most memorably their nontraditional entrée of grilled Red Snapper, which Rick decided was all too aptly named for the occasion.

Whenever the going got really tough, he longed to bury himself in his dish, seeking refuge from one Red Snapper with another. But he stayed strong; back straight, best behavior. Small enough bites to seem civilized, but not so small as to offend the hosts.

Sheila had heard about his one publishing accomplishment and wanted to know if he intended to continue writing “low-brow literature” in the future, and whether he intended it as a career or as a hobby while holding down a Real Job—especially if he was going to continue to “spend his money as fast as he made it.”

He rather meekly responded that, wherever his career path led, he believed his writing quality would improve over time, like a fine wine. The metaphor did nothing to appease Sheila Blaine, who had already decided that his writing niche was not a fine enough wine to begin with.

Then she wanted to know why he hadn’t managed to publish anything in the year since _In a Hail of Bullets_ hit the shelves. “Kyra tells us you’re always writing. All this writing and nothing to show for it?”

“I’ve got a good portion of another novel completed,” he assured her, carefully neglecting to elaborate that _Flowers for Your Grave_ had bit the dust. “And I’ve just started a new one, which I’m really excited about, called _A Rose for Tonight.”_

Kyra offered him a bright smile from across the table; he’d mentioned that she had somehow inspired his newest novel, but this was the first time that she was hearing anything about the title.

Sheila Blaine scoffed. “Sounds like something Danielle Steel turned down.”

Rick opted not to ask whether that was an insult because Sheila approved of Danielle Steel or because she condemned her. It was pretty clear that it was an insult either way. He smiled back at Kyra and attended to his Red Snapper, the one that was on his side.

It was a very long Thanksgiving dinner, and when it was finally over, Rick had never been more thankful in his young life.

Kyra said he deserved a medal for it all, but Rick declared that dating Kyra was its own reward. That made her smile. He remembered that.

Then, a year later, he published what had become _A Rose for Everafter_ and dedicated it to Kyra Blaine.

It was just in time for their second anniversary, and for a moment there he didn’t know which surprised him more: that they were together that long or that he’d turned into the kind of guy who remembers an anniversary with a girlfriend. When had that happened, anyway? He guessed it was probably when he’d finally dated one for more than a year.

And he really liked this one.

* * *

He traced the words of that dedication now, revisiting the old manuscript once again after his rooftop rendezvous with Kyra tonight. Dedications were the sorts of things that Castle usually added late in the process, but he’d gone back and included this one in his handwritten manuscript.

_For Kyra Blaine, you make the stars shine._

He smiled and tucked the book away, but before heading to bed, he stopped at his desk and rebooted his computer.

It was far too late to get any serious writing done, especially if he wanted to be conscious when he got to the precinct tomorrow, but there was one thing he needed to do.

This sequel of his would eventually need both a title and a dedication. The former was still his own personal mystery, but he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight until he had something for the latter.

He considered including everyone again— _all his friends at the Twelfth_ —but by now, all the people there that he really cared about had assured Castle in some way or another that they bore no hard feelings about Heat Wave or its upcoming sequels.

No, this particular novel was an apology to the one and only Kate Beckett.

As such, he considered using her real name, and ultimately decided against it. But he did want it to be clear which _KB_ was getting this book.

 _To the real Nikki Heat,_ he typed out.

He could always change it later.

* * *

She gave them space. She figured they needed that.

But she was damned curious about how all this was going to go. After everything that had happened, what would Richard Castle and Kyra Blaine’s lives look like now? Was this goodbye, this tender kiss to his cheek? What did all of this mean to them?

Never mind what it meant to her. It didn’t mean anything to Kate Beckett—it didn’t. It had nothing to do with—

Kyra strode to the door of the conference room, and Beckett guiltily swiveled back into place to pretend to do some paperwork at her desk. But Kyra stood patiently, her coat folded over her arm, smiling at the detective who had helped to save her future marriage. Having proven Greg Murphy’s innocence and trustworthiness, Detective Beckett and her team had given Kyra great closure about her decision to stand by a good man.

The least Kyra could do was return the favor.

When the detective looked up, Kyra had only one thing she needed her to know: “He’s all yours.”

And with that, Kyra may as well have handed over the Book of Richard Castle with an inscription made out to Kate Beckett. Whether or not she was ever going to accept it was another matter, but Kyra decided that that was something for the extraordinary KB to figure out on her own.


	10. How Much Grief

Castle was set to head out for the holidays—a time he would dedicate as usual to his family—when something new on Beckett’s desk caught his eye. He picked up the small greeting card and admired its whimsical touch of abstract art. “What’s this?”

Beckett leaned up from her chair to reach for it and murmured, “A thank-you for solving a case,” as though the tone of her voice could make a mystery any less interesting to him.

“Looks like an invitation,” said Castle, effortlessly dodging her hand.

“It is,” she admitted, now that he’d gone and opened the card. “It’s an invitation _out of gratitude.”_ By now, he would have seen the little note inside that said as much. She finally swiped it back and set it on her desk. “Look, Castle, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. If you don’t want me to go, I under—”

He interrupted her with a question that he spoke as a definitive statement, rubbing in the fact that he knew her so well: “You haven’t accepted it yet, have you.”

The chance to shatter his complacency was as pleasurable as a promising poker hand: “As a matter of fact, I did. Kyra and Greg said it’d be small and low-key and they just wanted the lead detective on the case to represent the team and celebrate with them and—what?” She studied his gloating smirk, disheartened that showing her hand had apparently backfired somehow. “What’s that face for?”

It was this look of serene mischief that drove her craziest. “I’ll see you there,” he said.

She dropped the gentleness she’d offered him just a moment ago. “Your ex invited you to her wedding? On _purpose?”_

He gave a shrug of a nod. “We parted amicably.”

He needn’t have reminded her, but she didn’t bother to tell him that she’d witnessed the _amicability_ through the glass of the conference room door.

“So,” he continued when she didn’t, “plans for Christmas?”

“Yep.” She turned her attention to her paperwork in the hope that he’d stop asking questions.

“Good.” He nodded approval that she didn’t need. “Well, I’ll be gone for two weeks,” he said, even though he’d told her this before. Stalling.

“Don’t worry, Castle. We won’t call you out to a scene in the middle of the night,” she promised with a teasing smile. “Not ‘til you need to procrastinate again, at least.” Then, lest he mistakenly believe that this conversation was meant to continue, she shuffled some files on her desk (oh, how he loathed even the suggestion of paperwork) and told him, “G’night.”

He took the cue, smiling back and turning to go, but then hesitated. Sure, he couldn’t meet her _g’night_ with a _tomorrow_ this time, but—“Hey,” he said. “For the wedding—pick you up at five?”

She flashed him The Look.

“Right,” he amended resiliently: “I’ll just . . . meet you there.”

* * *

That week, Castle decided to dedicate something besides _Heat Wave_ and a coffeemaker to the Twelfth precinct.

He’d convinced the catering company to print a note to accompany the long table lined with heated trays, large bowls of tossed salad, and a fantastic platter of cookies: _To all my friends at the Twelfth, with gratitude. R. Castle._ A banquet in the bullpen for the family of cops to share on Christmas Eve.

There were a few snickers about the benevolence of the rich old Scrooge, but those were immediately quashed by those who knew that Castle’s holiday spirit and general optimism made him the anti-Scrooge, no life-altering epiphany required.

Beckett was not part of that conversation, a few cops chatting at the other end of the table as they helped themselves to the entrée, but overhearing it made her smile. For one thing, it wasn’t often that she caught gossip about Castle that had nothing to do with either her or the women he was tailing. And for another thing, well, to someone already familiar with his stubborn optimism, _anti-Scrooge_ seemed a fair title.

Gossip aside, the token of edible appreciation left her with a bevy of questions. Did Castle know that she was going to be working tonight? Was she one of his _friends at the Twelfth?_ And if he didn’t know she’d be there, was he intentionally giving a collective gift to her department and nothing to her? Not that she had given anything to him—but still. Why show gratitude to all the cops who _didn’t_ put up with him day in and day out and not to the one he shadowed? And if he thought that Nikki Heat thing had been some kind of a gift to her, he had another thing coming.

But none of these questions were the sort that she could pose to Castle. The only one she even entertained the idea of asking him was whether he’d somehow known that she would be working that night, but a million times more appealing than _that_ conversation and the vulnerable places it might lead her was simply resigning herself to not knowing.

There was plenty that she didn’t understand about Castle. Why should that ever change?

Besides, this would all seem like old news by the time she saw him in two weeks, and calling him any earlier would be disrespectful of his wishes to be left alone so that he could devote the season to his family.

She certainly had no intention of doing that.

* * *

As the New Year came and went, Beckett wondered as she always did whether this might be the year that her resolution would actually bring her resolution. Eleven years cold, she’d put her mother’s case behind her, and every year she promised herself anew that she would make peace with that.

Ever since she’d made detective, she found herself in the precinct on the ninth of January. The beautiful thing was that it was never by Beckett’s own orchestration, like volunteering to cover holidays even when she’d otherwise be off. Thanks to some irregular shift scheduling and a perfectly timed leap-year, January ninth had fallen on a work day every single time.

Until now.

The very idea that it was the first time in a decade that the anniversary fell on a Saturday—one more small reminder of the day itself—was a detail that disturbed Beckett in a way that she hadn’t expected. But the fact that she would have all 24 hours of that day unaccounted for struck her with a sense of dread.

With just two days to go, she needed to make plans. She needed to find something to occupy herself. She needed it not to feel like a Saturday of a winter vacation.

Only one man had the power to help her.

She barely waited for Captain Montgomery to invite her inside when she rapped on his office door. “Sir,” she said, all-business; respectful yet assertive, “I’d like to work this weekend. I’d be happy to cover someone’s shift if overtime’s an issue. Do you have anyone who could use a break?”

“Yes,” said Montgomery. _“You.”_ He cut her off before she could disagree: “You already covered Christmas and New Year’s. You’ve been going hard on these last couple of cases, not to mention you’ve got trial prep next week. They’ll need you well rested. Take your weekend, Detective.”

“But, sir—”

“I know,” he said firmly, a certain kindness in his eye making up for the unwavering authority of his voice. “I know what this weekend is. But Kate, you cannot hide away in this precinct forever.”

He’d disarmed her with that. She didn’t want to be Just Kate here; not tonight. Just Kate didn’t have a badge or an assignment. Just Kate didn’t know she’d enroll in the Academy. Just Kate at this time of year slipped too easily into a past that she had resolved to put in its proper place. Beckett, on the other hand, had not only armor and a service weapon but her duties to protect her.

Montgomery seemed to realize that he’d cut close to the quick, so he did what his charge needed from him while standing by his own judgment. “Detective Beckett,” he addressed her, even more commanding and steadfast than before. “You are off-duty as of the end of your shift tomorrow. You will report back on Monday for trial prep as previously designated. That’s an order. Is that understood?”

She met his eye, finding strength and stability in assuming this role. “Yes, sir, I understand,” she replied, but what she said next caught even the detective by surprise, and once it was out, she would not take it back. “Then, with all due respect, I request tomorrow off. I’ll finish the fives I’m working on by the end of today.”

Something inside her screamed that more free time was the very last thing she needed to inflict on herself, but part of her countered that a Friday off would make Saturday feel that much less like Saturday. Besides, one day’s work on a fresh case that she would have to leave to her team while she obeyed a mandate for rest would do her no good.

Whatever the reason, the captain didn’t ask; simply stared back with an expression that told her that, even though he had no jurisdiction in her personal life, she’d better not do anything stupid while she was gone. “Request granted.”

* * *

Sometimes ideas and reality were so far from each other it was ridiculous. What the hell was she going to do with a three-day weekend?

She was in no mood to read Grin, not after the man went and died a month before his fifty-second birthday and left his beloved in a paradoxical whirlwind of stoic solitude and traumatized mourning.

The reminder was inescapable: Johanna Beckett had died one month before her forty-eighth birthday. When Kate thought about what a big chunk of Minaret’s book was left even now that the main character had died, it made her sick to her stomach. She had an indomitable will to live, as well as decent survival instincts, but sometimes it scared her to consider how many years of grief still lay ahead of her.

When it came down to it, it was actually easier to count how many years she’d already survived the loss. Eleven, as of tomorrow.

She knew so few people this long after their loved one had died; most of the survivors she encountered on a regular basis had much fresher wounds. She remembered that feeling, could relate seamlessly to that situation.

But how much grief were you supposed to feel after 11 years? She was coming up on this eleventh year like it was the proverbial eleventh hour.

It seemed to Kate that, even with the healing she’d done thus far, the grief itself never lessened. There was still a void in her heart where her trust belonged; trust in a world that wouldn’t deny her the life and love of her mother, the wellbeing of her father.

Over the years, part of her had expected that the grief would lessen under changing circumstances: It would hurt a little less once she finished her course of therapy, it would hurt a little less when her father found sobriety, it would hurt a little less when they’d passed the ten-year mark, it would hurt less still whenever they finally collared the bastard responsible for her mother’s death.

Her theory hadn’t totally held true all of the other times—after her own therapy and her father’s recovery and now surpassing that first decade—and that made her all the more afraid that knowing would be barely any better than _not knowing._

What if she was wrong about closure all along? What if there was no such thing? What if, even in pursuit of a very real killer, she’d been chasing a mythological beast?

As though the very thought of mythology had conjured him, Castle knocked at Beckett’s door.

When she opened it and found him in her hall, she was not pleased to see him here for the first time. The closest he’d ever gotten to setting foot inside her apartment was sending her that gown for their undercover venture to the charity ball last year. And even then, she’d managed to pick him up from his place.

It wasn’t that Beckett didn’t believe in a home-field advantage; it was just that she preferred not to invite trouble into her home.

That philosophy stuck as she offered her uninvited visitor no greeting except: “If you’re here to try to cheer me up, I’m going to kick you in the teeth.”

* * *

Earlier that morning, when Castle returned to the precinct a couple of days later than expected, all set to apologize and get back to work, Montgomery and Ryan and Esposito told him that Beckett had taken the day off.

They’d slipped him a few subtle hints about what she might be going through, so now Castle was prepared for her to hide behind a brusque exterior. His tactic was to start off light and vaguely self-deprecating. “Help me procrastinate,” he began, sparing her the _dirtier than I meant it._

She didn’t bite. “Castle, I left _you_ alone over the holidays.” Clearly as far as she was concerned, it was his turn to back off now.

Instead, he was distracted. What a multifaceted word—holidays. Castle had taken time to celebrate the traditional festivities of Christmas and New Year’s and his daughter’s freedom from school; for Beckett, the ninth of January was a personal holy day.

That realization changed the course of his response, made him more honest about what he was really doing here.

“Look,” he said, still not sure what he wanted her to see because now he was making up the words as he went along: “I want to do something for you. Even if it’s just keeping you company so you don’t have to do this alone.”

But she was still guarding her post at the door, refusing him access with every fiber of her being. “I don’t want you to do anything,” she insisted fiercely. “Do nothing, Castle. Can you do that?”

“I—I don’t know.” A wiseass comment about the impossibility of literally doing _nothing_ was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t get it out, distracted as he was with the fire in her eye and the weight of his heart. And did she mean _do nothing in companionable silence with me_ or did she mean _do nothing and leave me alone?_

“Then go figure it out somewhere else,” she said, and she shut the front door without another word.

As private and enigmatic as Kate Beckett could be, she certainly had a knack for answering questions that he didn’t ask, especially those he was not-asking very loudly.

* * *

She woke alone, she traveled alone, she arrived alone, and she felt alone all the while she was there.

Going to the grave didn’t necessarily make her feel closer to her mom; not when Kate kept her close to her heart with the heirloom ring on its chain. But being there and meditating on the Latin epigraph—VINCIT OMNIA VERITAS—was a way to honor Johanna’s life and values the way that she did each time she wore the badge she hadn’t planned to earn.

So Kate didn’t make a ritual out of visiting the grave the way that she’d taken on the necklace and the watch as her daily talismans; she simply went whenever she felt drawn to go, whenever honor was due or a quiet space for reflection was needed.

January ninths tended to fall under that category, anyway, but it was strange not to visit early in the morning or later in the evening, before or after work. The mid-morning sun peaked over a different skyline, casting different shadows, and despite the heaviness of her grief, Kate felt oddly light without her gun and badge, like she could get swept up in a breeze and float away. She realized it was the bad sort of floating feeling; gravity kept her grounded, and so did her work.

She wished she could reach out and link arms with someone who could keep her on solid ground, but she was on her own, so Kate stared at the engraved letters until her mind drifted into the clouds and the stones in the cemetery became no clearer to her than freckles on a distant face.

* * *

He agreed to meet her. She was surprised.

But not there—he wanted her to come to him. The place steeped in memories that she wouldn’t be able to shut out. But today, she didn’t want to. Today she went.

Jim Beckett opened the door before she had the chance to knock, and she remembered what it was like to come home to someone who couldn’t wait to see her.

For hours they chatted and noshed, hungry but in no frame of mind to prepare a proper meal or go to a restaurant. They set out all the sorts of snacks and appetizers that Johanna Beckett pretended she didn’t love to eat—mozzarella sticks, pigs-in-a-blanket, egg rolls, tortillas and salsa.

A savvy uptown lawyer with a penchant for finger-foods; if he knew, Castle would probably like the image almost as much as teenaged Kate had.

By no means did they avoid talking about Johanna, but there was one thought that was ever in the back of Kate’s mind. “I read something recently, Dad,” she finally told him, catching him mid-bite and smiling as he tried not to make a mess of himself. “A book I’ve been reading, actually. It said—an epigraph is like a dedication . . .” _to the dead._ The rest of the line went unspoken; got stuck in her throat.

Dusting the crumbs from his hands with a napkin, Jim smiled gently. “And I think we chose the right one.”

But that wasn’t the problem. She looked up at him, aching to find a tone of voice befitting a sincere desire to understand, not one of accusation. “You haven’t gone since—”

“Since I got sober. I know.” He took his daughter’s hand across the table, brushed his thumb along her fingers, and for a moment she wondered if he’d take her to task for her hypocrisy since it was so seldom now that she visited him at home. But his face showed only mercy and the hope that she’d reciprocate it. “Grief, like love, looks a little different for everyone. You know that.”

“I do. I understand. I just—”

“Could you do something for me, Katie?” he asked, as though he really wasn’t sure. That edge of uncertainty nearly broke her.

“Anything,” she said.

“Could you give me a copy of that poem you wrote about your mother?”

The memory, let alone the request, caught her off-guard. “Uh—sure. Yeah. I can do that.” She paused, and then, tentatively: “You remember that?”

It was really nothing special, that poem; she barely still knew all the words herself. But what Kate remembered more vividly was the day, several years ago now, that she shared it with her father. He was so hung-over that the sheer sound of her voice must have been a burden to him, and he groaned for her to go away. She wondered now how much of that was the hangover and how much was the grief that her words evoked, that he wasn’t able to confront just yet.

Jim was silent for a moment as he sorted something out inside himself. “To me,” he began slowly, “your words are even more of a dedication to your mother than that old epigraph.”


	11. Haven't Accepted It Yet

When the first bout of stoic solitude gave way to the kind of mourning that could tolerate company, the widowed Nina Grin opened her door to Victor Medtner.

He was worried about her. He was worried that she wouldn’t let him in, that she would lock herself away in the little house by the Black Sea and refuse all help. But she opened her door.

Victor was a friend—both to Nina and to Alexander, before his death—and he was unwilling to let Nina go; refused to turn her away just because she had withdrawn in grief.

He convinced her to step outside with him for fresh air and sunlight and the chance to venture beyond the empty house; away from the card table in the study where Grin did most of his writing; away from the bed by the window where Nina had propped up his ill body with pillows just so that he could keep an eye on the sea.

They veered from the shore, Grin’s sacred ground. Victor led her away.

They talked mostly about their common loss; coping. But once Victor pointed out the antics of some wild birds, Nina seemed to brighten. They spoke less of Grin and more of the life they saw; admired the little black masks of the Lesser Greys perched on a fence and the bright blue blossoms of the urn-shaped muscari flowers.

Even as a reader, Kate’s detective instincts sometimes kicked in, and this time she suspected that Mr. Medtner had a little crush on the widow. The way he spoke to her, the way he looked at her, the way he appreciated her presence and her perspective of the world—all clear signs to anyone who wasn’t too close to see it.

It was only a matter of time before he realized it for himself, Kate decided. The only reason that Victor wasn’t admitting it was probably that Grin’s death was still so recent; that Victor couldn’t possibly feel this way about someone whose heart still belonged to someone else.

In the meantime, he met her nearly every day just to walk at her side.

* * *

Within only a few short hours, Greg and Kyra were about to strap on the ball and chain for life. And Castle would be there to celebrate it with them.

He was already in his suit, had been for a little while now, as though getting showered and shaved and dressed to go in advance would make him better prepared. But much as Castle would have preferred not to admit it, there was mental and emotional preparation involved here, too. And there was only so much of that he could do from here.

There was no way to rehearse this ahead of time—no way to practice real acceptance while aimlessly shuffling around in his loft, just like planting himself in a chair wasn’t enough to figure out how a bound Nikki Heat would get free. Once again, the power of imagination only took him so far.

The only way to work through his mixed bag of emotions was to lug it along with him to his ex-girlfriend’s wedding, where he would sit on it stoically. Only once he saw Kyra off properly, with genuine joy for her, could he then dare to open up his baggage in private and sort through the mess.

When he’d last seen Kyra and accepted her grateful goodbye, he hadn’t found as much closure as he might have expected he would. The wedding would finally make it real. 

He hated that he was thinking about this day as though he were going to an open-casket funeral.

Get a grip, Rick. No one _died._

But if he was honest with himself, he was grieving. It was a sort of sickly happy grief, under the circumstances, but grief nonetheless.

* * *

Eventually, he stood at his bookshelf and retrieved the manuscript that still made him feel like he held _time with Kyra_ in his hands.

He had changed the book’s title soon after he and Kyra tested the waters and had a noncommittal conversation or two about their respective views on marriage. The phrase “Jurassic institution” stuck with him. That day he found out that he believed in something she didn’t, and that was hard.

Especially because he loved her.

He didn’t exactly have many role models for the thing—marriage. Something in him just believed in it, believed he might want it. Might want it with Kyra.

So _A Rose for Tonight_ wouldn’t suffice. He needed her to believe in Everafter, let alone happily ever after.

And it really looked like they were headed that way. Kyra applied to Oxford for postgraduate studies, and this time was promptly accepted. While plenty of their classmates started to panic about the ominous phase of life after graduation, Kyra spent her last semester of college knowing and loving where she was headed next.

It would have been hard for Rick not to believe in happily ever after while watching Kyra’s dream unfold. And his dream was to go with her.

He’d talk on end about all the great writers who ever lived and breathed and drank in Oxford, about the Bodleian Library and the little Bridge of Sighs, about the rowers navigating the River Thames and the cattle to be found in Christ Church Meadow—how he planned to stake out a booth in a moody pub or sit on a bench beneath a tree along that broad dirt path and write a great manifesto (or at least another novel or two) and wait for Kyra to join him there after kicking ass in her tutorials.

It was a good story, one that they both said that they wanted. So it didn’t matter so much to him that Kyra wasn’t keen on marriage yet; he figured they might get there eventually, and wherever they went in the meantime, they would go together.

Until the summer when she booked her flight to Heathrow, when she told him that she intended to go it alone, that this was something she needed to do, that she needed space.

It seemed to him to come out of nowhere.

He had already eased up on voicing his imaginings about their new British life, and the book he’d dedicated to her had been out for months, but Rick still couldn’t help but wonder if somewhere along the way he’d said too much, asked too much.

 _Ever after_ was a long time. Maybe if he’d only said _tomorrow,_ it wouldn’t have scared her off. Tomorrow is hopeful, not eternal. _Tomorrow_ is renewed each today, and that was the sort of ongoing loyalty that they’d shared until they didn’t. Kyra might have appreciated _A Rose for Tomorrow._

Castle closed the book, restored it to the shelf. He’d believed in marriage when Kyra hadn’t. Now he was twice divorced and she was just starting fresh.

He himself admitted that he still liked the institution of marriage, but he’d never quite been able to appreciate the day-to-day. He knew it took two to tango and he’d made his share of mistakes, but he also wondered if maybe his marital dances fell apart because he never found someone who saw that kind of partnership the same way he did, someone willing to work out the inevitable conflicts with him no matter how bullheaded either of them got, someone who thought their day-to-day was worth a fight, someone he could trust to be there for him and who would trust him to be there for her.

As difficult as marriage was, he hoped they would make it. As difficult as hoping that was for him, he hoped they would make it. He hoped Greg and Kyra would last.

And it was time to go.

* * *

For such a small ceremony, it was a lot to take in. Fewer floral arrangements; a minister; guests in only one row of chairs parted in the center and facing the front of the room where Greg already stood, so very ready and what looked like the good kind of nervous.

Even in Kyra’s absence, Castle could see her touch there in every modest, tasteful detail. The other event had reeked of Sheila. It was clear to him that Kyra had taken the month since their first attempt at a wedding to do even more than recover from the loss of her old friend and get through the holidays; Kyra had planned _her_ wedding, as non-Jurassic as she ever would have wanted it.

This is the one he would have wanted her to have.

From one of the seats on the makeshift aisle, Sheila addressed him with no sense of surprise at his last-minuteness: “Richard. You made it.”

“Yes. Yes, thank you,” he said, navigating past her with an awkward shuffling twist, as though looking her in the eye might turn him to stone.

“You gonna sit?” came a friendly voice. His gaze fell to Beckett aglow in pale lavender and alone in a small cluster of empty chairs. She patted the seat on her right; closer to Kyra’s loved ones, as though she’d saved him a more honored spot.

He wandered over to her as though still considering his options. “Next to you?”

She grinned. “Unless you want to sit on the groom’s side.”

No, thank you. Without further ado, he took his seat beside Beckett—trying to look casual about claiming the one on her left, a safer distance from Sheila Blaine. He fixed his jacket as he sat and glanced around again at the gathering, quite possibly the smallest wedding he’d ever attended.

Beckett leaned to her left and bumped into his shoulder, and for a moment he thought they’d collided while both absentmindedly checking out the room, but it turned out that she’d come in close to speak covertly. Still looking forward at the groom at the altar, she whispered to Castle, “If you’d gotten here any later, _you_ would’ve married him.”

He rolled his eyes and lightly nudged her back into her place. “Traffic,” he murmured.

She nodded, not pressing him, and he breathed a tired sigh.

“Listen, about last weekend—” he began, wondering how on earth she was being so affable with him after the way they’d parted at her door, but a swell of music cut him off, and Beckett patted his thigh in a _don’t mention it_ sort of way.

And before he knew it, Kyra was there, striding purposefully toward Greg and the minister who would wed them for ever after.

* * *

Near the threshold of the dining room, Castle reached forward for Beckett’s arm and slowed her down until she stood ahead of him. A few of the guests held back to chat or use the restrooms, while a few others were finding their seats, and he needed to devise a plan.

The sudden touch and the warmth of him at her back weren’t enough to make her skin flush, but his breath just above her ear was. Before she could give him what-for, he hissed, “Can we make a pact?”

_“What?”_

“A pact. It’s open seating. That’s like open season. Please.”

She didn’t even need to turn to know the panicked look in his eye. “Is that why you’re using me as a shield?”

He’d been clinging to her biceps and crowding her back, so fine, yes, that was an accurate barb. But he didn’t release her yet. _“Please,”_ he hissed again. “Take a seat _anywhere_ not near Sheila and let me follow you.”

Never mind a shield. She felt like a hostage, and the firm restraint of Castle’s hands was nothing compared to the heat that was torturing her insides. A need rested low in her belly and she told herself that she was hungry.

The sooner they went to sit down, the sooner she could make the hungry feeling go away.

“Fine. Come with me.”

* * *

“So,” said Castle, relaxing now as he escorted Beckett to a seat before taking his own. “Six times a bridesmaid. How many times catching the bouquet?”

Her nose scrunched at his playful prodding, but she set the bridal bouquet on the table and unfolded the napkin for her lap. “Once,” she said, deciding that humoring him took less energy than avoiding what was really such a simple question.

 _“Really,”_ he said in singsong, a twinge of excitement and curiosity. Beckett’s first bouquet—and he was there to see it. And laugh mercilessly.

Then she added, “Well, twice now,” and took a sip of water.

“Really.” Less singsongy. Less excited. Moderately curious.

“That one was all kinds of awkward, though.” She saw his brows quirk in question and explained: “Well, the groom tossed the garter for the men. Then they plopped me in a chair in the middle of the ballroom and told the bride’s brother to put his sister’s garter on _me.”_

“That’s—not so bad,” said Castle, trying to pull off unaffected.

“With only _his teeth.”_

Castle reached for the champagne near the center of the table and announced to the few guests who’d been talking amongst themselves: “So how ‘bout that bubbly?”

He knew Kyra well enough to know that a garter toss—along with its public retrieval from the bride—was not her style, but if he didn’t distract his tastebuds and his nerves with something intoxicating soon, he was going to spend an entire evening at Beckett’s side with unrestrained thoughts about his mouth charting a course along her leg. Garter and public coercion optional.

Meanwhile, Beckett thought that his apparent discomfiture with this anecdote was strictly on her behalf, and it made her chuckle. Normally she might have teased a story and left him hanging, but this time she reassured him. “It was fine, Castle. He was super sweet about the whole thing, definitely a million times more embarrassed than I was, and he used his hands.”

Castle poured himself a tall, tall glass.

* * *

Whether he was daydreaming or not, Beckett was a pretty good distraction, but even Castle’s attraction to her did not make him forget entirely about the mixed bag of emotions he’d lugged to the wedding with him. He felt like he was still sitting on it, just trying to keep it from bursting open.

And without even meaning to do so, Beckett had brought her own baggage along, too.

 _Not a woman alive who doesn’t think about her wedding day,_ Castle had teased. _Not even Kate Beckett._

The truth was that thoughts of her hypothetical wedding day were wrapped up in thoughts of her mother. There was the fact that Johanna wouldn’t be there for it, of course, but then there was also a ticking clock even more harrowing than any biological drive to procreate in time—the ticking clock that counted out her life in juxtaposition to her mother’s.

She knew that she wasn’t quite ready yet, but that didn’t stop her from thinking about how her mother had reached certain milestones by this age, like so many of her own friends now.

Johanna and Kyra had both pursued long paths of education and careers and only decided to marry when they were good and ready, but seeing that Kyra was doing so a little later in her life gave Beckett a strange new sense that the path she was on was all right.

It marked a decisive end to the past year’s preoccupation with being of _The Age that Johanna Began a Family._

Closure.

Maybe it existed after all.


	12. If I Didn't Write

Beckett set aside her mostly-eaten slice of wedding cake and poured another glass of champagne, remembering what her father said last week about her poetry—not only the idea that her words honored her mother’s life, but that they did so in a way that meant something to him, even after he’d pushed Kate away.

She looked at Castle, who was oddly quiet and lost in thought himself, now that their tablemates had scattered about the room. Then she returned her attention to her champagne flute and asked as though out of thin air: “When you write, do you think about how people will read it?”

Castle almost choked on his cake, recovering quickly and acting as though nothing had happened, despite that Beckett was still mildly alarmed (amused) and watching him closely to be sure he wouldn’t die. “Well, sure,” he managed tentatively. “I write with intent to publish.” He waggled his brows because he’d just made his job sound like a crime, and he thought she’d appreciate that.

Instead, she took half a beat to decide to rephrase. “Oh, yeah. But I mean, do you write and then, I don’t know, re-read it like you’re someone else and imagine how it sounds to them? Or get somebody to read it before you send it in officially? Or do you just—you know, go to it?”

If she was furtively asking whether he imagined how a Nikki Heat book would sound to her when she read it, he was not about to answer that. He said, “Usually I ask Alexis to be the first set of fresh eyes.”

Beckett nodded. A little lightheaded and cozily warm, she asked, “Is it easier to share fiction with someone you know?”

“As opposed to someone I don’t know?”

“As opposed to not-fiction.” The world of her poetry was as real as her mother’s death. A truth for a truth.

“I don’t know,” said Castle. “I don’t write non-fiction.” _Yes,_ he thought. _Good. Remind her that I don’t think it’s real._

“I know you don’t,” she said, thinking about eulogies and epigraphs and poetry and wondering if it was pointless to have this conversation when Richard Castle didn’t write these things. Still, she couldn’t seem to stop there. This time she spoke _Castlese:_ “I know you always say, ‘What would make a better story?’ But that can’t be all it is, can it?”

He was amused to hear her quote him back to himself—how tipsy was she to be doing _that?_ —but she continued before he could get a word in edgewise.

“Because if that’s all it was, it wouldn’t matter who tells the story.”

“Sure, it depends on who’s telling it,” Castle agreed. “If a writer decides what would make a better story, I guess that choice says something about the writer.”

He swallowed then, suddenly hearing himself, and hoped that Beckett wouldn’t read into it in a way that would get him into trouble. For all of his excuses about “traditional” mainstream lit, there was really only one way to interpret the writer’s take on the Nikki Heat thing based on a comment like that.

_We would be a better story if we were having sex._

“No, not that,” she said, and he wasn’t sure which surprised him more: that Beckett didn’t call him out on what his creative choices said about him, or just how _relieved_ he was not to deal with it now. “I just meant that it makes a difference who writes something. Like—like a eulogy.”

She narrowly dodged telling him what happened with her dad and the poetry several years ago, and the conversation they’d had last week over their spread of finger-foods.

_“To me, your words are even more of a dedication to your mother than that old epigraph.”_

She was already speaking so freely, it nearly slipped out. But she still had her wits about her and there were some things that she knew well enough to hold back, to hold sacred.

“Oh, of course,” said Castle.

“It matters who gives a eulogy,” Beckett continued, not really hearing him now. “It means something when the speaker knew the person—can honor their memory and share their legacy.”

He studied her eyes and her brows and the thoughtful little crease between them. So this was about death, then?—this unusual conversation about the writing process and being heard and the difference between one voice and another? Not Tipsy Beckett nosing around his writing habits to embarrass him?

She didn’t wait for him to respond. “So I wonder if it’s similar with songs and poetry and stories. How unique Hayley Blue’s lyrics were to her, for instance. How, even though she performed, it’s like she wrote some of them just for herself.

“Maybe,” she added thoughtfully, “it’s just as gratifying to write something for yourself and learn that it’s meaningful to another person as it is to write with a whole audience in mind and get their praise.”

He smiled at the insight, but even more so because it came from Beckett. After all, she was a cop, not a writer.

She glanced at him fleetingly, just enough that he felt like he was still meant to be included in this conversation. “So is that why the adage, ‘Write what you know’?” she asked. “And how does that even work in fiction if it’s _fiction?_ And—”

Castle grinned. “You want me to answer here somewhere, or just be the bobble-head to your talk radio?”

She flashed him a quirked brow. “The what to my what? Oh. Yeah, go ahead.”

He nodded once, geared up to tell a story. “One professor told me over and over to write what I know—decent, longstanding advice, right? It’s why I research what I don’t know to flesh out a story.”

“Oh, I’m familiar with your research,” she assured him a bit bawdily, abandoning the champagne flute for the slice of cake now.

“Except,” Castle continued, “this guy was mainly a memoirist and didn’t ‘get’ the mystery novel thing, so we didn’t always agree about what that meant. He was a good writer, though, and I did value his input, so I tried. Well, at the time, I knew high school and college. So I wrote _Death of a Prom Queen.”_

He paused, refraining from adding that he published that novel right around the time that Kyra went to England. It was also around the time that he decided to hang his first rejection letter on the wall. He stole a glance at the bride across the room.

“But you know what?” he said, turning to Beckett, and not shying away when she met his gaze and held it for the first time in what must have been hours. “I really like writing what I don’t know. Sometimes that’s how we work things out that we don’t understand—just like dreaming. Or explore things that a fictional character would think and do even if we wouldn’t. Or give something a practice run on paper. Or imagine something different that may never exist except inside us. But that’s the great thing,” he said, his voice low but magnetic, “because once you say it or write it and give it to someone else, it exists in them, too.”

He couldn’t read her. They were looking into each other’s eyes and, God, he couldn’t read hers. Why did eyes mean so many things all at once? He looked at her lips; watched her roll them inward just enough to dampen them with the tip of her tongue. His first and only logical thought was to wonder how inappropriate it would be to kiss her at Kyra’s wedding dinner.

But maybe he could just— _say_ something. Say something that existed in him and see if maybe it existed in her, too. “Kate . . .”

“I have to pee,” she said suddenly. She left the napkin from her lap at her place setting, stood and strode to the ladies’ room; left Castle alone at the table with his own baggage.

He imagined unlatching it to stuff one more unwieldy emotion inside.

* * *

Kate had no sooner gotten past the restroom door before she leaned back against it, closing her eyes and sighing deeply.

“Everything okay?” Kyra smiled back at her from the row of sinks as she washed her hands.

“Yeah,” said Kate, still pressed to the door. Her eyes shifted as she considered how ridiculous she must look, inexplicably pinned in place, and she promptly released herself. “Yes. Thank you.”

“By the way,” the bride said, turning off the faucet, “I’m really glad you could be here. For us, and for Rick.”

“Oh. It’s nothing.” Kate eyed the stalls. She didn’t particularly like to have conversations through a bathroom stall. Was Kyra done chatting now? Could she go pee without expecting more pleasantries? She took a tentative step forward.

But Kyra had missed all significant nonverbal cues when she’d gone to dry her hands. “He doesn’t always say things outright,” she said.

Against both her bladder’s wishes and her better judgment, Kate was compelled to curiosity. “What do you mean?”

“Just that I don’t know if he’s said it, but I hope you know what it means to him to have you here. Sometimes he can be hard to read.”

Kate managed a smile as the bride headed for the door.

But Kyra paused, trying to figure out where to draw the line in self-disclosure and avoid prying into an acquaintance’s life, yet unable to leave without saying something else. “You know, eventually I assumed that he would follow me no matter what I said, no matter how I pushed him away,” she told Kate. “He was the one who decided that respecting my wishes was even more important.”

It was only when Rick finally published _Flowers for Your Grave_ a year after they parted that Kyra took it as a sign that he’d moved on; that she wasn’t distracting him anymore.

But she kept reading. And chances were good that she would keep reading. She was hoping for a happy ending to Rick’s story, whatever that might look like.

So, really, what was one more little nudge to the first woman who seemed to her to be on the same page as Rick Castle?

It wasn’t meddling if it was helpful. (Oh, no—was she really going to become Sheila Blaine?)

As Kyra left the room, Kate made a break for a stall. Good champagne tonight. She really did have to pee.


	13. I Meant It

It had been a year since Castle last saw Donna.

Considering the endless possibilities of bad press, he was always glad to see the lovely Donna Vincennes from the _New York Ledger._ She did with words what good photographers did with cameras and lighting. Her blurb on him last year for the Top Ten Bachelors list showed his best side.

 _All_ of his best sides, really—all those fit for print.

It probably hadn’t hurt that he’d flirted with her and she’d flirted back—not in a personal way that suggested something might come of it, but in that fabulous way that paparazzi do with an eligible celebrity throwing off his sexy creative juju. A bit of sexual tension went a long way to add that extra little _sizzle_ to the news.

At the sound of Donna’s voice, Castle snapped back to attention: “How does it feel when fans tell you how much your books mean to them?”

“You know, it’s funny you should ask,” he said, without realizing that he was about to embark on an odyssey of a ramble: “We were at this wedding—for my ex, except she was also involved in our last murder case, just as an innocent bystander, so now we’ve got like a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing going on. 

“But anyway, Beckett and I went to the wedding—the one that didn’t have a dead person—and Beckett said the funniest thing. Actually, what she said wasn’t funny; it was just funny that she said it. About _writing._ She never wants to talk about writing, not seriously. We always talk cop stuff, which I guess is cooler, technically, but all of a sudden she wanted to talk about the writing process. Weird, right? 

“Anyway, Beckett said that she wonders if writing for yourself—something you need or want to say for you—and then finding out that it means something to someone else can be as gratifying as writing with readers in mind who then affirm your work. Kind of insightful. I mean, she’s a cop, not a writer.”

Donna made a few notes, but the contrast of how much he said and how little she wrote made him pause.

“So I think that answers your question.” (Did it? He was having trouble remembering what the question was—something about meaning?)

Donna smiled. “Oh, I think so.”

* * *

Even in her most rebellious years, Kate still quietly admired her parents’ marriage. Seldom was there a doubt in her mind that they would go the distance; that they would each only ever marry once, because theirs was a lifetime kind of love. And Johanna’s death had done little to change that impression.

But there was a new question floating around in her mind lately, ever since Victor Medtner’s crush on Nina Grin had evolved into shameless pursuit. And even though the startling implications of the Dick Coonan case were what prompted her to meet her father at the diner, she’d barely spoken about the investigative side of things before the conversation turned very personal.

“Do you think you’ll ever get married again?” she asked, the question tumbling out before she found herself sort of sputtering a poor attempt to elaborate. “You still talk about her a lot, sometimes like she isn’t even gone . . . and I just wonder . . .”

Jim hesitated, the worry lines of his face aging him a few years in a single heartbeat, and she immediately regretted prying.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said. “Forget I said it. I shouldn’t be asking.”

But his reply was very soft, gentle. “No, it isn’t that. It’s just that . . . that’s—complicated,” he told her carefully, and suddenly she felt a little like a child; wondered if her father—the man whom she’d helped to pull from the pit—was about to dodge the conversation and blame it on the fact that she just wouldn’t understand.

But it wasn’t like that, she realized, watching his face grow pensive, even hopeful.

This wasn’t the kind of _complicated_ she sometimes heard from her parents when she was small. This was the kind of _complicated_ that Jim himself was still sifting through. She could certainly appreciate that.

She allowed him the silence and a patient smile.

He nodded slightly as he seemed to find the words. “Katie, sometimes we find people that are just so hard to let go. Even when they leave us. We talk about them all the time, as though we can speak them back into our presence. That’s how much we miss them.”

“I didn’t mean—” Had he thought she begrudged him his talk of Johanna? That she took it as some indication that he couldn’t move on? Did he think Kate, of all people, would expect that of him? “I like that you still talk about her. And I think you’re right. I was just wondering . . .” and she trailed off, not really sure now what she was wondering or whether it mattered.

But something opened up in Jim, and he carried on the conversation with a kind of quiet ease that suited him. “We had two decades together, you know.” He smiled warmly, the joy of having known and loved unable to be overshadowed even by the extent of his pain and loss. It brought an even deeper timbre to his voice; more solid and self-assured. “I vowed to love your mother for always and I meant it. 

“I also said _‘til death do us part,_ but I never dreamed that day would come so soon, or so unexpectedly, or so violently,” he said. “I need the time and space to grieve that, and that might look different for everyone. For me it means knowing that I’m not ready to love again and that that’s all right. That it’s all right if I never am. But I promise you this: If I do ever remarry, it won’t mean that I’ve stopped loving Mom. I couldn’t.”

At that, Kate realized that she didn’t feel like a child, but she did feel a little like she was a college kid again. This was a conversation ten years overdue. And now they were making up for a little lost time.

She smiled, holding back her tears, because this was such a beautiful side of her father that he’d opened up to her, and no matter how touching his words or how tragic the story behind what he said, somehow the declaration deserved a smile more than it deserved tears.

Besides, if she let down the dam now, she might not make it out the door in one piece, and she needed to keep it together.

“So,” he said finally, now regarding her as both daughter and detective, as though he sensed that she was ready to transition from the solely personal to the more professional side of things: “what have you found?”

* * *

There was one stop that she needed to make before heading back to work.

When Castle beckoned her inside his loft, he spoke in an even tone, offering her both a reassuring presence and an unexpected promise: “I will do anything you need, including nothing, if that’s what you want.”

_“I don’t want you to do anything. Do nothing, Castle. Can you do that?”_

He was telling her that he could. He could do that for her. He would do anything and everything and even nothing if she only said the word.

But Beckett was no longer in the void of nothing where she had spent the eighth of January; where she had isolated herself and turned Castle away.

She had stepped out of the void to visit the grave, to phone her dad, to cross the threshold of the widower’s home and laugh and lament over finger-foods. She had stepped out of the void to fulfill her responsibilities for trial prep, to attend the Blaine-Murphy wedding as promised, to shield Castle from Sheila, and even to feel the warmth of his proximity and hear the insights of his life’s work. And she had stepped out of the void because Jack Coonan and Dr. Murray had left her little choice.

No, she still had a choice. It was just that she was choosing differently now.

“What I want is to find my mother’s killer.”

* * *

A few hours ago, she killed a man.

It wasn’t like she had never done that in the line of duty before, and certainly, under the circumstances, it was difficult to think of her victim as human—or even a victim, for that matter. Not only had Dick Coonan killed her mother, letting her bleed out in an alley alone, but he’d also killed his own brother. He’d already ensured that there were few to mourn him. Kate felt that much more vindicated.

But she did have blood on her hands: Coonan’s blood and the blood of any other victims he may have killed whose loved ones deserved the closure of _knowing_ —how and why. Knowing _why_ matters.

And because Coonan was dead, she and however many others would have to wait until another lead came along before they could know why.

Without a moment’s hesitation, without even a conscious decision, she took action that put Castle’s life above the only lead she had to solve her mother’s case. It wasn’t regret. It was just—

_I need him alive._

Just who did she need?

Late that night, she wept at her bathroom sink, having washed the blood from her hands for the dozenth time.

She folded herself there over her arms, her body wracked with sobs and shudders, her face covered in tears and snot, the hopelessness of her situation overwhelming and unbearable even to consider, let alone to live with.

By the time she was ready to pick herself up she had already slumped to the tile floor, a messy heap of grief and confusion. As the barrage of emotion subsided into want and weariness, she stood and washed her face and hands once more.

She went to her bookcase—found nothing, because _Macbeth_ was out of the question and _As I Lay Dying_ was like a bad joke tonight and God knows none of those murder mysteries were right for this.

No, she went back to her room and took The Other Book from her bedside table—the book that Castle had signed for her years before they met. Not because it was a murder mystery or because it helped her understand why people did what they did. Nothing could tell her _why_ tonight; why Coonan had killed her mother, why she had killed Coonan.

She chose it because it was soothingly familiar; because she knew almost every word by heart.

* * *

She was caught up in a breeze off the sea, her feet firmly planted on the rock, but her body feeling light and empty inside the swirl of salty air, as though she could float away at any moment.

As her hair and her black dress curled and thrashed at the wind’s every whim, she busied herself with new discoveries on the ground, wandering from the solid ledge to the beach that offered more to find. She bent down now and then to gather sticks and stones, which she began to twine together with seaweed and string to form a small figurine. He didn’t even have a face on his little head, but for some reason, he made her laugh. A silly little stick-man made of sea things. Something out of nothing. Joy out of emptiness.

She heard someone else’s laughter, and she turned in surprise to find Castle. Her breath caught as he came right up to her, his blue eyes shining and his short wisps of hair every bit as windblown as hers. But he didn’t look afraid that he would float away. He didn’t look afraid at all.

He smiled, took the stick-man from her hand, and stepped so close to her that she swore she could smell his cologne infused with the sea-salt air.

She was wearing a belt at her waist, and his hand brushed lightly against her abdomen as he secured the little stick-man at her hip. Her stomach fluttered with the warmth and intimacy of the touch. She closed her eyes, willing herself to lean into the vulnerability and the not-knowing, and she felt him lean in beside her ear to tell her softly, “Now you’re yourself, Kate.”

She opened her eyes, ready to see him so close, but as soon as she did, he was gone, and the grounding warmth of his presence became the startling coolness of the unimpeded wind.

When she looked around her, she saw a spot of something red on the horizon in the distance, but she couldn’t quite tell what it was as long as it stayed out there. Silently, she urged the spot to come in, in, and it came just a little closer to shore until she could see that it was a sailing ship. And oh, it was beautiful! The most magnificent thing she had ever seen.

She stepped into the water just enough that soft foam lapped at her feet.

Then, like Assol, she outstretched her arms to the ship, its sails as scarlet as the blood of innocents, but the ship never came in. Only blood in the water, washing in with the tide.

She stepped back at that, but she stood at the water’s edge until she felt weak, and it was only then that she looked down—put a hand to her gut and took it away to see that it was covered in her own blood.

She couldn’t remember when she’d been wounded.

She couldn’t yell; she couldn’t call out. She could only crumple to the ground as the effects of the wound consumed her. She would bleed out until she was dead, and there was nothing she could do.

Then her old training officer stood over her body, and—good, she thought, at least I won’t die alone. But he wasn’t there to watch her die. He always did expect even more of her than she expected of herself. His voice was textured but low and even, like a sheet of gravel, and nevertheless commanding. “Stand up and fight, kid. There’s still work to be done.”

He was right. Those were the words that got her out of bed in the morning.

She wanted to call him. He was the only one who understood what drove her; what her life was all about. But they hadn’t talked in so long. She put down her phone and took out the watch and necklace instead.

* * *

As Beckett took a bite of sushi and looked at the array of food that Castle had set on her desk, she couldn’t help but smile to herself. It was a nice gesture, of course, but to her, it was even more than that.

And then, suddenly, it was like it wasn’t enough to keep it to herself; like she wanted someone to know why this was something worth smiling about. She wanted him to know.

She swallowed her bite and asked, “You know what this reminds me of?”

Of course he didn’t, but that never stopped him from guessing before. “The gastronomically dangerous Epcot?”

She didn’t even roll her eyes, but her expression meant roughly the same thing. “My _dad,”_ she said, attempting to maintain the serious tone and baffled at the warmth creeping into her voice; couldn’t tell whether it was the man she mentioned or the one beside her that caused it.

“You mean the sushi, or eating at a desk?”

She shook her head slowly, eyes trained on him and lips fixed together in an apparent plot to off him. “I meant all the different foods you’ve got here, Chef.”

She hesitated, but it was obvious enough that she had a story to tell, and Castle couldn’t help himself. He set down his Thai food, rested his elbow on the desktop, and leaned his chin into his palm, an intent look in his eyes meant to urge her onward, letting her know that she had his undivided attention.

It worked. She smiled—a really lovely smile, one that he realized that he didn’t see very often but that he vowed to see again and again, and she said, “I saw him—on the ninth. I went to visit him and we talked a while and we didn’t feel like cooking, so we just popped a few random appetizers in the oven and picked at them.” She bit her lip for a second and then the smile was back, to his delight. “All the stuff my mom always pretended she didn’t like, you know?”

No, Castle didn’t know _anyone_ who pretended not to like something. . . .

But he dared not taunt Beckett now; not when that smile was on the line. So all he said was, “I’m glad you weren’t alone.” Guiltily, he remembered his faux-pas of showing up unannounced at her door the day before The Big One, and his face showed as much. He hadn’t wanted to remind her of something stupid he’d done. He’d just actually meant it. He really was glad.

God help him, Beckett took it the right way. “Me, too,” she said, and even though the smile receded, she still looked perfectly comfortable to be sitting here with him, talking about her parents and sharing four kinds of takeout.

He had just picked up his fork to resume eating when she spoke again, as though she’d read his thoughts.

“By the way—” She looked up to find that she already had his attention; looked back down and busied herself with her meal because, really, they didn’t _both_ need to be looking at _each other_ for this. “My go-to is Chinese food,” she said, a small smile and one rogue eyebrow accentuating her candidness. “For future reference.”

Admittedly, he’d always found the word _reference_ kind of hot (a sexy librarian thing, no doubt), but seldom before had the word _future_ sounded as wonderful as it did now from the past-driven Beckett.

Because she meant it.

* * *

That night, Kate held _Heat Wave_ in her hands without even opening it.

 _“What if I let her down?”_ she’d asked just before interrogating Coonan, daring Castle to come up with a more positive consequence than the one in her head.

But he hadn’t played her game. He’d sucked her into his own. _“Do you know why I chose you as my inspiration for Nikki Heat?”_

_“No. Why?”_

_“Because you’re tall.”_

She’d smiled at that. The unexpected. The way he relaxed her like a friend instead of handing her platitudes. The way it worked. The way he knew it was enough; that she was ready.

_“Now go in there and do your job.”_

She took out a new notebook—the old one still relegated to the bookshelf in the entrance—and set to work making amends between Nikki and Rook.

It didn’t take long for them to reconcile.

She wanted him around.


	14. Secret Agent

With her dress bag draped over his arm, Castle gently ushered Beckett into the elevator at the Twelfth. “Some people just don’t know how to act on a date.”

 _“Especially_ on a first date,” she agreed, pressing the button to their destination.

“Exactly.”

They rode down toward the lobby, standing side-by-side, both looking forward. In the safety of proximity without eye contact, Beckett ventured to ask: “So how’d you know I’d like Remy’s?”

Castle grinned. She’d set him up for an easy response; how long had he wanted to say this to her and stand a chance that she would believe him? “I just know you that well.”

“You do not.”

Ooh, shut down. Or maybe not.

“Is that a challenge?” he asked, facing her. “Because if it is, I’d be glad to raise the stakes.”

She chewed her lip for but a moment. “Just what did you have in mind?”

“I’ll guess your order.”

“You’ll what?” she laughed. “Castle, last week you brought me food from _four_ different places because you couldn’t pick just one. There were _four_ different countries represented on my desk. And no Chinese, by the way, which now you know is my go-to.”

“Food and drink,” he insisted. “If I’m right, I take you home.” When she arched one menacing brow at him, he quickly amended: “Your home. The door. Walk you, cover cab fare, whatever. Just deliver you and your dress bag here”—he lifted it more into view—“to your place unscathed.”

Admittedly, he was still feeling a little guilty that he’d sent Tipsy Beckett off alone after Kyra’s wedding dinner, even though Beckett had assured him she was sobering and perfectly capable of such things as paying a cab and using a key.

She’d been right, but he’d been worried, and she hadn’t picked up the phone when he’d called later. He’d had to restrain himself from running to her apartment.

“Really? _That’s_ what you want?” she said, turning her head to meet his eye again, but retreating very quickly even as she maintained her confidence. The elevator bell rang and the doors opened to the lobby, and Beckett stepped out ahead of him. “Wouldn’t you just like a chance at winning back some Gummy bears?”

A year ago. Kate Beckett remembered their card games from one year ago, and for a moment, hearing Beckett talk about their shared past was almost as wonderful as a mention of the future.

He buried the joy and smirked instead. “At least this time I didn’t suggest playing for clothing,” he accidentally announced to the room. The crowd around them was just large enough for his comment to draw minimal attention. He guessed Security had more important things to be listening for. As he caught up to her, he lowered his voice to add: “I don’t think Remy’s would appreciate that.”

She ignored his tangent; turned on her heel to face him. “All right, and if you’re wrong?”

Ah, Beckett. Always prepared for him to be wrong. If she could see the scoreboard in his head, she would finally realize that the odds were against that.

He simply replied, “Then I’ll pay your bill.”

Win-win for Richard Castle. Didn’t matter which way the wager turned out. He went ahead and gave himself a tally now.

In the cab along the way, he opened his notepad and tore out a page.

“What are you doing?”

“Guessing,” he said. “I’ll write it down and you can check it later.” Suddenly, he looked up from the notepad, pen waiting in-hand. “One crucial question first.”

Yes. Curiosity officially piqued.

He waited half a beat longer than necessary just to savor her expression and silently dubbed it her Interested Face. Then: “Want to split an order of fries?”

She shook her head at him, her lips pressed into a faint smile, but her answer was positive. “Fine. Sure.”

“On me,” he insisted. “So I won’t count it toward your order.”

“Anything to make guessing a little easier, eh, Castle? Narrowing it down?”

He folded the piece of paper and tucked it into his coat pocket. “I’m just being practical. They’re really generous with the fries. I’m hungry, not barbaric.”

“Mm-hmm.”

* * *

He was eating a burger, just minding his own business, when they walked in and sat down.

“Castle!” she laughed, a little more loudly than usual for public dining, and immediately restrained herself.

But it was enough to get Vince Minaret’s attention across the room; enough to get a glimpse of them sitting together and enjoying themselves, even though he was too far to hear their conversation, save for Kate’s outburst. 

He remembered the night last fall that he’d met Kate at the book launch party—how they’d talked over drinks and he’d gotten up the nerve to ask her to leave with him; how she’d followed him out to the sidewalk and he’d kissed her right there in the middle of a crowd just because he couldn’t stand waiting any longer.

And then the realization he’d had by the—what, fourteenth?—time that Kate said Castle’s name.

At that point, he’d studied her eyes. _“You think about him a lot, don’t you?”_

Her voice had been unusually weak in response: _“We see a lot of each other.”_

She’d looked at his lips, but he’d kept reading her eyes. He saw a quiet fury there, a desperation that seemed to have less to do with arousal and attraction and more to do with a need to repress something.

She wanted him to kiss her, but not because she wanted him to kiss her.

And he didn’t.

Instead, he waited until she met his eye and summoned every fiber of his willpower to forgive her—hell, forgive himself—for what he was about to do: tell her gently, _“It was nice to meet you, Kate,”_ then proffer his hand and walk away.

It wasn’t simply the fact that Kate had repeated Castle’s name so many times; it was how she had said his name—as though for no other reason but to taste it on her tongue.

Vince knew that sound, that subtle smile. Even in the midst of her frustration, it became increasingly obvious that she was distracted with the very thought of him. And, despite all of her verbal complaints, she was obviously not so strongly opposed to thinking of Castle that she could turn off the distraction, even in the middle of making out with someone else.

It takes a secure man to pursue a woman whom he knows to be thinking, mid-kiss, about another man. _Secure_ being the euphemistic term.

And Vince was just secure enough to admit that he was not such a man.

In fact, that was the moment Vince had realized that being with Kate—for just one night or for anything more—would make him no better off than Victor Medtner, futilely chasing Nina.

A work of biographical fiction, _Grin_ was ultimately a love story. Even though Alexander was gone, Nina’s love for him long outlasted their years of marriage.

Vince knew and respected plenty of people who remarried after a spouse’s death, and in that way, Medtner wasn’t wrong to love her and believe that she would love him in return. Especially when she _tried_ to care for him as more than an old friend and a companion in her misery. But the fact of the matter was that Nina did not want another love, and Medtner did not respect that; kept pushing when what Nina needed most was support, not pressure. And that was wrong.

Of course there was a difference between Nina, who had lost her husband of almost a decade to cancer, and Kate, who, for all he could tell, was pissed off at a man she wasn’t even dating. One shouldn’t have necessarily reminded him of the other.

There was just something about that passion—even passionate anger—and that wistful longing that was too palpable to avoid. Even if he hadn’t written it once before, it would have been impossible not to sense it in Kate. He probably just would have taken Kate to bed and relished the charge of energy in her without caring that it wasn’t all for him.

But he _had_ written it. And for the first time, he understood a little of what Medtner felt. When Vince first wrote the novel, he related most to the more heroic Alexander Grin—in that way that authors do when they covet what their characters have. He never thought that he would relate so well to the character that he’d designed to be a jerk.

In this case, Kate’s interest in him was easily clouded with her loyalty to another, and that was enough to suggest to Vince that he was only going to be a minor character in Kate’s life. And not just any minor character, but _that guy._ That night he’d realized he didn’t want to be that guy.

He hadn’t _wanted_ to think that way. Every bit of testosterone in his body would have liked to accept even a one-night stand for its own sake if that’s all that it was to be. And really, what was stopping him? If Kate was willing and everything was consensual and they weren’t cheating on anyone—what was the harm?

At the time, he couldn’t really explain it. A disconcerting experience for a man who makes a living with words.

He’d enjoyed Kate’s presence and personality like no one in a long time. And none of that had faded with the realization that he could have her. But no matter how badly he wanted her, wanted release, wanted escape, he didn’t want to be the only one wholly lost in the moment.

They’d connected in light of—in spite of—their loneliness and frustration. But it’s hard to help each other forget when one person is hell-bent on remembering what she’s escaping and says his name like she misses the taste of it.

So maybe Kate’s love and grief were not as great as Nina’s, and Vince’s initial intentions were less honorable than Medtner’s. But he didn’t have to push, didn’t have to be the jerk. He could make a decision that he could live with. He could care about an acquaintance at least as much as he cared about a character in a book.

After all, much of reading and writing hinges on our ability to care about strangers. And so does not being a dick.

No, he would not be Kate’s Medtner. He would not kiss her and hope that it would convince her to choose him instead; to forget the man who had her heart, even in his absence.

Kate had been available—he still believed that was true at the time. She just hadn’t been _available,_ tied up as she was in her unspoken bond to Richard Castle.

And now it seemed to Vince that Kate had finally come to terms with that. A harsh critic of writing who was later discovered scratching away in her own notebook in the corner of a café, Kate Beckett had likewise gone from groaning about Castle to laughing happily in his company. And even more, if the _Ledger_ had it right.

Awkwardly enough, Vince’s own book agent, Suzanne Cherish, was the one who discovered the blurb.

Suzanne was a diehard Richard Castle fan who would gladly step in for Paula Haas (or just about any woman in his life) if the opportunity ever arose. It was because of her that Vince was at the _Heat Wave_ book launch in the first place, and when it came down to it, it was because of her that he ended up at the open bar looking dejected and alone and hungry for any human interaction worth a thought.

Not that he had expected her to be great company—a brunette bombshell who never liked to arrive at a party alone but who then preferred to circulate solo—but he’d hoped, dragging him to this thing, that she might be at least mediocre company. She could be clever and charismatic when she wasn’t so self-conscious or self-absorbed. She had persuaded Vince to go to the book launch under the guise of _networking,_ but Vince had suspected her of ulterior motives—officially confirmed upon spotting her with the red strap of her cocktail dress dangling off her shoulder while Castle signed her skin with a borrowed pen.

Gave new meaning to the phrase “double agent.” No doubt she had approached the other writer to check on his status with Paula and investigate his publishing plans.

If he hadn’t found such good company in Kate, Vince wouldn’t have left the open bar any time too soon.

He really needed to look into getting a new agent.

But for now, he had this one. And when he’d arrived at her office to go over his latest contract, she was poring over the cover of the _Ledger_ ’s entertainment section. She’d squealed with both excitement and a sort of keening pain, gasping for air and showing Vince the paper as her only means of telling him just what had incapacitated her:

_Though claiming to be single, Richard Castle is rumored to be romantically involved with Detective Kate Beckett, inspiration for Nikki Heat, the heroine of his novel. Bachelor Number Nine might not be on the market much longer._

Vince didn’t have the heart to tell his agent just how lovely Kate Beckett was in person, let alone that this development was a long time coming.

He looked up again at the couple in the booth across the room, pangs of jealousy and _what-might-have-been_ tempered with a not-so-modest sense of self-satisfaction in his ability to read people and even a bit of genuine happiness for Kate, if not for Rick Castle.

He’d thought she was sexy when she was angry; it paled in comparison to her joy.

Kate laughed a laugh that lit up her whole face and playfully smacked Castle’s hand from across the table. They were obviously in the honeymoon stage of the relationship, where they couldn’t resist touching each other even fleetingly, and every glance and gesture was electric.

Three months since he, a mere acquaintance, had suspected it himself. It was about damned time.

* * *

“How’d you do that?”

“Easy,” she said.

He fumbled with his straw wrapper, his hands not quite managing the detail work he was asking of them. In his frustration, he murmured a list of the things his hands could do—at least, those fit for public dining: “I write. I fence. I pick locks—”

Not an entirely bad list of hobbies to confess on a first date, or pseudo-date.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” she interjected about the locks, just as he said, “—I have _great_ dexterity. Very deft fingers.”

She avoided his eyes, letting his comment slip by beneath hers. Deft fingers. She would pretend she didn’t hear that, too.

But she did reach across the table and helped him fold his straw wrapper until it approximated the lovely three-dimensional star that she’d made out of her own.

She expected his hands to be warm, but they were cool because he’d already picked up his milkshake while she’d been busy crafting. After that, she ignored the touches, the closeness, investing her attention instead on coaching him, but her hands never wandered far from his.

Meanwhile, Castle was out of his mind with sensory overload—the cool dampness left on his hands after holding the cup, the contrasting warmth of Beckett’s occasional touch, the very _instance_ of Beckett’s touch.

The way she said things like, “Here, try this” and “Just like that” in a soft but steady voice that coaxed him to arousal.

The glint in her eye when his misshapen star was done, and he was just about to say something to celebrate it when she flicked her own star right off the table at him and laughed.

And he was gone.

Kyra had made the stars shine, but Kate made stars soar.

He sent his sailing back at her.

No pillow fights in the book, he’d promised her once. And no straw wrapper star wars. But that went without saying.

And they never stopped smiling.


	15. Official Offer

Remy’s was neutral territory, where neither Beckett nor Castle had the home-field advantage, but that didn’t stop them from battling. It also didn’t stop them from acting as though they were in the privacy of their own homes.

That secret, unprintable side of Kate Beckett suddenly made a public appearance, and Castle couldn’t have been any more delighted. He couldn’t have been any more delighted because, all the while, Beckett was enjoying herself.

She didn’t need to say so. He could just tell.

That delighted him, too.

“Castle! Cut it out.”

“See,” he said, reaching across the table to retrieve the tiny misshapen star they’d made from his straw wrapper and flicking it at her again, “it’s just that it’s so hard to take you seriously when you’re still laughing. Maybe if you had a safe word . . .”

Beckett cut him off: “Shoot one more star at me and I’ll shoot _you.”_ For once, the fire in her eyes looked more like thrill than threat.

He only grinned and sipped at his shake. “Won’t give up the power, huh?”

* * *

By the time their food came, Beckett wondered if Castle had forgotten their bet or if he just knew that he’d lost and hoped that she forgot it. Either way, he left the piece of paper in his pocket, and she couldn’t really read his body language to determine anything about what he’d written. It sort of looked as though he knew that he had won, but then again, she’d played poker with the man, and this was more or less the way he looked right before she made off with most of his Gummy bears.

At least the food was delicious, she decided, and so welcome after the disappointment of Drago. And the conversation wasn’t lacking, either.

Castle had plenty to say, yet he wasn’t terribly self-absorbed or even unbearably nosy. As far as company went, he wasn’t half bad. Even when he teased: “So, reading anything good? Maybe taking _Heat Wave_ for a Round Four?”

It didn’t bother her like it did the last time he’d pestered her about reading his book more than once. She’d gotten used to him pulling her pigtails. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’ve been reading something else.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s it about?”

She decided not to admit so readily that, when she wasn’t _with_ a writer, she was still reading about one. “A Russian man,” she said vaguely, “living through the Revolution. Though he died, so . . .”

Castle looked offended, and not just at her poor story summary. “You’re cheating on _Heat Wave_ with Russian literature?”

“No,” she said. “It’s a fairly new book by an American writer: Vince Minaret.” She wondered if she’d just given herself away—what the book was or the fact that she’d kissed the author.

Meanwhile, Castle only noticed that she corrected him about the book and not about the “cheating,” but he wasn’t exactly in a position to make something of that. Beckett could read whatever she wanted; he knew that. In fact, their taste in reading material was one of the things he most liked to discuss with her. So he swallowed down the tinge of jealousy that had bubbled up at the sound of an unfamiliar name and decided to lean back on humor. “Think you’ll read it more than once?” he asked, as though asking whether or not she expected a recent date to be more than a one-night stand.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “This one’s 499 pages; it’ll take me a while longer.”

Castle choked on his shake, making a vanilla mess. “Four _hundred_ and ninety- _nine_ pages? He couldn’t squeeze out a few more words to make it an even 500?”

Beckett silently handed him a napkin so he could clean himself up.

“Anyway,” he murmured, drying the table, “book that long, he’s probably compensating for something.”

In light of their conversation by the elevator, he had started authoring a dating guide in his head, and under First Date Etiquette he added the rule: _Do not, under any circumstances, talk about the length of another man’s book._

 _Heat Wave_ had been just shy of 200. He vowed to himself that its sequels would be a bit more substantial—longer, but by no means fluffed up with BS. Just as long as they’d need to be to do justice to the stories. But definitely longer than 200 pages.

“Don’t worry about it, Castle,” she said, interrupting his thoughts with a devilish smile. “Size only matters to a point.”

He flicked the shooting star off the table at her, his heart soaring with her laughter.

* * *

They had finished eating long before their meal was over. Considering they’d left the precinct after 10:30, their (second) dinner out was anything but a brief stop. There were hardly any other patrons in the place by the time Castle and Beckett agreed that they didn’t actually intend to camp out at Remy’s just because it was open all night long.

Never mind that it was three in the morning, and staying any longer would mean an inevitable walk of shame. That part, neither of them bothered to mention.

“Moment of truth,” she said, an edge of nerves to her voice. “Let’s hear it, Castle.”

Silently, he extracted the little slip of paper from his coat pocket and slid it across the table as though he were making her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

She glanced at the paper, but he recited his thought process for her as though she didn’t have his guess written in front of her.

“One strawberry shake,” he said. “One medium-well burger with lettuce, tomato, mushroom, and green pepper. No ketchup, not because you never eat ketchup, but because you’re wearing something you like enough that you—”

“Impressive,” she interrupted him, pushing the slip of paper back across the table for him to retrieve. “And so close.”

“Close?” he said, checking the paper again. “What do you mean ‘close’?”

She shrugged. “It was a cheeseburger.”

“But I—oh.” In his haste and complacency, he must have forgotten entirely to specify that; hadn’t even noticed the discrepancy as she ate, distracted as he was with her lips and her laughter and even an accidental brush of her leg against his. _“Burger,”_ he said quickly, taking off into a ramble. “Burger could mean ham or cheese. It’s not like I wrote ‘quiche.’ Although that could also mean ham or cheese. Or both. So that actually proves my point. It _is_ like quiche. I’m not convincing you, am I?”

She shook her head. “Surprised you got all the veg, though. And strawberry. I think we’ve only had burgers and shakes at the Twelfth once or twice since you’ve been around, and not even from Remy’s.” Having let him down gently with compliments and congratulations, she smiled and said, “All right, now pay up.”

“Guess so,” he said, taking out his wallet, his visage of reluctance looking just a little too forced.

It was then that Beckett suspected that Castle had still won.

She kept up the ruse. She acted just as he did—as though his paying for her meal tonight was no more chivalrous or romantic or indicative of any feelings on the part of either one of them than the apologetic four-course takeout they’d shared at her desk last week.

But the more she acted that way, the more convinced she was that the gesture was platonic and the harder it was not to wonder what could possibly be the harm in letting Castle take her home. Her home. The door. Just to deliver her there unscathed.

Unscathed and warm and full-bellied and satisfied.

* * *

They hit the cold midnight air outside the restaurant, her dress bag draped over his arm again, and the absence of him at her own arm made her feel nothing like she had won.

She turned to him. “You know, Castle, you were right about almost everything.”

That made him grin. “Wow,” he said. “What are the odds I can get that in writing?”

“I mean, what’s one topping, right?” She took out a couple of bills and offered them to him. To the man who, one week ago, gave one hundred thousand dollars to the lost cause of catching her mother’s killer.

She swallowed the feeling that what she offered him now was insignificant, but she also swallowed the feeling that it held any greater meaning than what it was.

Just the cost of a burger and shake and at least half an order of fries. A fair offer.

Not a pitiful sum compared to a grand gesture of generosity.

Not a silent plea to let her lose their wager, just this once.

No, neither of those. Nothing but a fair offer to make good on her word when she simply wasn’t sure which of them had won.

But even though her outstretched hand undoubtedly told Castle one thing— _Take the money_ —the barely perceptible tremor in her fingers told him another: _Take me home._

Or did it?

Sometimes ideas and reality were so far from each other it was ridiculous. That could have been nothing more than his imagination. It wouldn’t be the first time.

He knew how eager she’d been to offer to repay him that money he’d put up. This wasn’t that.

It wasn’t Coonan’s interrogator who faced Castle tonight in the chilly air.

But he still could not decipher the shiver that ran down Beckett’s spine. Did she long to be warm or did she long for his warmth?

He hesitated, her meaning too unclear to him. “No,” he said finally, quietly. “No, we had a deal, and I’ll honor that.”

It was what she’d once told him when she’d made him leave the precinct. They’d made a deal: one more case before he’d be gone again. And she’d expected him to honor that. Then one extraordinary apology later, she was offering him _tomorrow._

That was a lot of tomorrows ago now.

And after everything they’d been through, especially over the past couple of weeks, this “honoring a deal” thing didn’t seem to cut it anymore. It was—inadequate, somehow. How could he possibly believe what she’d confided in him just last week, _I want you around,_ if he was still operating on a level where they had temporarily stagnated months ago?

“This isn’t a deal,” she said suddenly, catching him off-guard. “This isn’t a bet or a win.”

He was officially confused. “What isn’t?”

“Walk with me,” she said, her clarity honest but incomplete until the last words came out on an exhale: “Just walk.”

They held each other’s gaze for what seemed a timeless moment, reading each other, speaking without words.

His eyes confirmed it: _You mean nothing more._

But hers said: _I mean nothing less._

He nodded once. “Okay,” he replied, a smile playing at his lips. “I can do that.”

Then they chatted and laughed and even enjoyed silent companionship all the way to her door.

Not a single comment passed between them about it being three in the morning or about practical concern for her safety—or for _his,_ more realistically. He knew that she could take care of herself, and even as a lowly civilian, he certainly had a flair for getting himself out of trouble.

So she just wanted him around a while more?

He decided that Beckett was wrong about one thing. It was a win. Not even a tally in his mind would properly commemorate it.

This time, when they parted at her door, Beckett didn’t slam it in his face. In fact, she even smiled as he gave her the dress bag and let her return to her quiet apartment, her sacred space. 

If she could do all that after five _unofficial_ hours alone with him, Castle decided, then that was a good sign.

He smiled, too.

* * *

Of course, there was yet another snarky comment from his mother about arriving home in the wee hours—not to mention her general confusion as to how an evening with Amanda Livingston turned into a late night with Detective Beckett.

“Closed the case,” he said by way of explanation, sidling up to her in the kitchen. He caught the jug of orange juice in her hand before she could restore it to the fridge and poured a glass for himself.

“Mm-hmm.” Martha gave one sniff to the air and a pointed look as if to let him know that his distinct _Essence of Burger_ told a different story. But she only beamed, picked up the _New York Ledger_ from the counter—the copy with Amanda Livingston’s photo cut out but Richard Castle and his controversial blurb still very much intact—and pushed it into his chest, barely waiting for him to take hold of it before she headed to the stairs. “You know, darling,” she said, “this is how rumors get started.”

* * *

One of the pieces of advice that Vince Minaret had given to Kate that Sunday afternoon in the café was to know where her characters were coming from and where they were going in any given scene. He said it might help her tie up loose ends, or at least feel a better sense of the overarching story as it gradually took shape.

The next time Kate wrote about Nikki and Rook, she swept them off to celebrate a mutual friend’s wedding in Las Vegas. They weren’t there _together,_ but neither of them had brought a date, and they fell into an easy banter while spending some time in the casino at the hotel where all of the wedding guests were staying.

Kate even managed to refrain from all the cliché “getting lucky” jokes—and what surprised her even more was that Rook did, too.

He was actually quite the gentleman. Nikki noticed.

He did want her to be awfully open and honest with him, though. In the midst of their playfulness—their general flirtation and a few kisses behind the Roulette table—Rook still wanted Nikki to say what she really thought, and he wouldn’t settle for anything less. He wanted to know if she believed that they could ever move in the same direction again.

She thought maybe they could.

That night, they shared the elevator on their way to their respective hotel rooms. He was supposed to drop her off on the fifth floor before going on to the seventh himself, but one passionate kiss with her back pressed against the elevator wall was all it took for her to miss her stop.

Nikki and Rook got off on the same floor.

Three times.


	16. Anything's Possible

“Well, well, _well,_ Beckett,” he sang. “Look at you, thinking like a writer.”

She froze as only a guilty party might; made the mistake of looking at him. “What?”

“Your story,” he said, eyes vivid with something like power.

She faltered again, tucked her hair behind her ear and headed for her desk; retrieved her royal blue coat from the back of her chair and slipped it on.

By now, Ryan and Esposito were gone. No one else to butt in and save her from her shadow.

“It’s late. We’ll pay Maggie another visit in the morning,” she said, trying to steer.

Castle looked off in thought, helping himself remember her words and quoting them back to her: _“‘She smiles, picks up a bat, thinks of everything he’s done to her. . . .’_ I liked it. You really got inside the character’s head there.”

Of course, he delivered this critique with the same chain-yanking humor that she’d indulged when she crashed his reading of _Storm Fall_ and mocked his prose (and _wind gathers up hair exactly as you would expect, Beckett)._

But she signaled no appreciation for his revenge, so long overdue. She only huffed at him: “Suspect. She’s a suspect.” Maggie Vega was not a _character._

“I know,” he said, sobering apologetically, wondering if her objection was something more than a reminder that they were working a real investigation and not a fictional one.

First and foremost, Beckett honored the victims, but she also dissuaded her team from using terms like _perp_ and _skel_ for suspects who deserved some amount of dignity if nothing else. He silently added character to the list of potentially dehumanizing terms.

Then, because her mouth was still a narrow line, he gave a little more, hoping to let her know that he really did know: “Guilty or innocent, she’s a human being.”

That gave her pause; brought her back to the floor where she delivered chest compressions to a bloody man whom she’d wanted alive for no other reason but to give her a lead in her mother’s case, back to her bathroom sink where she’d wept brokenly and washed away blood that was no longer there.

She knew there was a fissure in her heart that only some measure of penitence could mend; the thing that was supposed to mark her as somehow different from the man she killed. She was the one sworn to serve and protect and use only due force; the one meant to experience remorse when that vow was breached, no matter the circumstances. Even after being cleared by The Powers That Be in the follow-up investigation, found to have acted honorably for a cop in a rough situation.

But Coonan’s humanity still meant little else to her except that he was mortal and died inconveniently.

Castle had read her wrong. This time she’d only been objecting to his insistence that their theory-building was some kind of storytelling. She felt sick with embarrassment about her secret hobby. What Castle had evoked in her instead was even worse.

Not really sure what he was sensing except that they had sputtered to a stop, Castle switched gears from _Drive_ to _Neutral_ and got out to push. “Think Maggie’ll be the type to confess?”

She let no more than a furrow of a brow give her away before she escaped the emotional mire, back to banter basics: “I don’t know, Castle. You’re the one with mind-readers in your family tree.”

* * *

A quirky family history wasn’t all he had.

Castle had soft hands.

It was true. Kate knew for herself because she’d felt them—even with fleeting touches—as she helped him fold his paper star.

She’d taunted him about their imaginary trip to Cuba _(“I don’t know, Castle. Me, in a swimsuit, under the hot, blistering sun?”)_ and relished the look on his face as he’d recovered enough to offer to lather her up with some lotion, but it had all come back to bite her in the ass.

Because twitterpated Castle she could handle. Raunchy and suggestive Castle she could manage. But an off-handed comment that reminded her of his _deft fingers_ and the twinges she’d felt and buried as she’d touched his skin? That was dangerous.

She didn’t bait him once the rest of the day.

* * *

She needed a distraction.

At home that night, lounging on her sofa in her pajamas, she found Nina Nikolayevna Grin reading one of her husband’s books, _She Who Runs on the Waves._ It looked like Nina needed a distraction, too.

The widow who had opened her door to Victor Medtner had eventually opened her heart to him. But no matter how much she wanted to love again, she kept one foot out the door, ready to run. She was retreating more and more now to Alexander’s stories, remembering the days they worked out character names as though they were naming their own children, the nights that they’d curl into one another and dream.

 _“To forbid dreams means not to believe in happiness,”_ he’d often said, _“and not to believe in happiness means not to live at all.”_

Victor’s presence was soothing, but it was remembering Grin and his strength and his imagination that most got Nina through the years that the Nazis occupied the Ukraine. He’d never know how much he’d saved her, even so many years later.

After the war, his books made a comeback, but then they were banned on the basis that they were “useless dreaming.”

Nina had never found them useless.

She treasured the books like rare and precious heirlooms; saw traces of her husband in the fiction; in his words and ideas and characters. Captain Grey of Scarlet Sails was still her favorite Alexander counterpart. No matter what hardships he faced along his journey, he never lost that rare gift of his: the capacity to expect a miracle in life, always.

But today, Nina was having more trouble remembering who _she_ was—who she was with Alexander, who she was in his eyes—and for that she turned to She Who Runs on the Waves.

One heroine was the epitome of common sense and self-confidence. She saw the world from behind one philosophy: If I don’t understand, then it doesn’t exist. The hero focused much of his attention on this woman—and understandably so. She was a force of nature.

But ultimately it was the second heroine who most captivated him. She was private but personable. She smiled broadly and openly. She believed in happiness. She could dream. She could live.

Nina knew that Alexander wrote them both with her in mind; he wanted her to see that she was sincere and rational, intellectual and poetic, emotional and reserved; that she could be anything and already was more than she knew she was. He teased that there was so much depth to her that one fictional character wasn’t enough.

But most of all, he wanted her to see how much he loved her openness, her ability to dream. He wanted her never to forget that.

Her tears consecrated the page.

_“You aren’t the only one who misses him,” said Victor, and she turned to find him at the threshold._

_She told him she knew that; knew that the day she lost her husband, Victor had lost a good friend._

_But that wasn’t what most troubled him. “Then don’t make me lose you, too.”_

_Even as she looked forward, facing away from him again, she heard in him the decade of unarticulated frustration surging to the surface._

_“You still think of him,” he said._

_She could hardly deny it with his book cradled in her hands. “Of course I do.”_

_“You still think of him as though he were here.” He was pressing her, pressing her to admit that more than enough time had finally passed for it to be possible to move on now. “I’m here. I’m here and sometimes I don’t think you are.”_

_And for the first time, Nina admitted it, all of it. Much time had passed, but she needed more. “Victor, I’m sorry.” She apologized to him because he deserved it. But she would not apologize to herself for realizing the truth. She needed time, and she was ready to give that to herself._

* * *

The truth was that he wished he really could read Beckett’s mind.

 _“That’s the beauty of the mystery,”_ he’d told his daughter earlier that night.

And there was no mystery more beautiful than Kate.

Especially when she was fan-girling over meeting _Joe freaking Torre._ That was a twist that he did not see coming.

He was quite certain that she was a mystery he was never going to solve. In some ways, that was exciting—the idea that there was this endless possibility to Katherine Beckett.

But then there was also part of him that was inexorably drawn to solving her. It was part of why he wrote; to understand her better, to piece her together in his mind, to make sense of her. And it was why he couldn’t stop asking questions, pushing limits, nudging her bit by bit past her comfort zone until she was open to him.

He couldn’t forget the side of her he’d seen today. _“I just met Joe Torre, so anything’s possible,”_ she’d gushed, and grinned; did everything but flip her hair.

He was sure that it would take more than one impossible thing becoming a reality for Kate Beckett to become as interested in possibility as she was in the truth, but her optimism—even in jest—did not go unnoticed.

He liked that Beckett. She had the same smile as the playful woman who sacked his gut with a pillow, the patient woman who taught his hands to fold a paper star.

And, by the way, where had she learned _that?_ He was the one who prided himself on party tricks. He was the one with charlatan blood.

His image of her was expanding, becoming every bit as three-dimensional as the stars she folded.

She liked baseball and went to games with her father since she was three. (And, oh, what he wouldn’t give to see pictures!) She carried a purse while out for a date, but seldom in the rest of her off-duty time, smuggling anything she actually needed in pockets when she had them. At work, she excelled at the sort of deductive reasoning expected of a detective, but she thrived when she became fully absorbed in storytelling, especially with him. Whether she admitted it or not, she came alive with that sort of imaginative work, and he sometimes wondered whether she was just as lively in imaginative play.

There seemed to be so much more to learn about her, but he knew this much: She was more than her badge, her job. She was more than a daughter out for justice. She was even more than the muse he had imagined her to be; mystery upon mystery and layer stripped from layer now.

It was then that it hit him.

Beckett could be anything.

They could be anything.

 _“There is no us,”_ she’d spat at him, after Donna Vincennes had blabbed the lie in her blurb.

But there _could_ be, one day.

After all, there was already more of an _us_ than there had been just a few days ago. There was an us that had spent five hours dining and laughing and walking together _after_ the last case was solved.

Last week, Beckett had stopped him from leaving for good because having him around made life a little more fun, and she’d requested his company the other night without it hinging on a wager.

Anything was possible.

He just wished he knew where they were now.

Where did they stand? His best guess was _somewhere sort of good,_ and that was surprisingly satisfying to him. For all of his interest in getting Beckett into bed, he was feeling more and more confident about conducting this sexless friendship wherein the theory-building and banter themselves were not exactly platonic. He found constant hope with every little change that emerged in her; all the little ways that she was letting him into her life. And he didn’t want to rock the boat while the sailing was good.

But then again, just because sexy banter and non-wagered walks home were fine for right now, that didn’t mean he believed he could do this forever.

 _Can’t miss what I didn’t have,_ he’d told Alexis, because it had always been true about his father.

But as a generalization? It was a lie. Even as he theorized and bantered with Beckett, even as he thought how _good_ things actually were, how exciting it was to have so many possibilities still ahead, part of him still missed what he didn’t have—what they didn’t have.

It may have been the manly part of him.

He may have had to do something about it.

He imagined Kate in the shower with him that night; felt her hands slide against his slick skin; imagined committing to memory what he himself had never seen or experienced. She was breathless and breathtaking and the water beating down on them was making her hair stick to her face and—oh. Oh.

He leaned forward against the shower wall, scalp turned to the spray, bracing himself with one arm and closing his eyes as he let the water pour down and drench his face. The release was exhausting but it only took the edge off his need.

By the time he had dried off and dressed, he was sitting at his laptop, a voyeur to Nikki and Rook’s intimacy.

And just a little jealous of his characters.


	17. Whatever You Want

Beckett versus Lady Irena. What had he done so right in a former life to see that unfold before him today—in a playroom, no less? Clearly karma thought he had been very, very good.

He’d thought that a wife/fiancée catfight was hot. That had nothing on the domme/detective battle he’d witnessed while perched unobtrusively on the spanking bench. Both women were intelligent, strong, and self-assured, attempting to tear one another down with nothing more than a surprisingly civil talk of legalities and privacy. But there had been an undeniable energy in the room that struck him with a new frisson of arousal. That was a scene he couldn’t help but continue in his mind at night.

What began as a fantasy of them double-teaming him—and surely Beckett’s teasing question, “Think you can handle two women at once, Ricky?” would have undone him on the spot—instead became a fantasy of the women vying for him. They didn’t collaborate. They _competed._

So very, very good.

There was only one problem.

As generous as the Universe was to him, it had sadistic timing.

The other night, he’d decided that he was never going to finish his manuscript—at least not one he’d want to publish under his name, let alone one that would make Beckett like him any better—if he let himself give way to fantasy without also concentrating on his plot.

He could still touch himself. He could still think and dream about anything he wanted; he knew none of that would change, nor would he want that.

But since the other night, he had forbidden himself from writing more sex scenes unless they were integral to the plot. As it was, he was still _removing_ sex scenes that didn’t really fit that bill and cutting out details that went beyond what Black Pawn would want. Privately, he didn’t care what he wrote; he had few hard limits. Professionally, a vague line was set before him. He liked to toe that line and maybe even nudge it further without actually crossing it. He liked to pretend that Black Pawn was his bitch and not the other way around.

So he put in the time and did the work to advance the plot and minimize the gratuitous stuff, really tried to craft both a good story and a good apology, but really, he couldn’t help but wonder. What were the odds? He had _just_ resolved to scale back when a pro-domme was killed and hung from the monkey bars.

Seriously?

And then Beckett was oh-so-nonchalantly identifying custom cuffs and assuring the guys that _that position_ was entirely possible. (Castle prided himself on believing a great deal was possible; admittedly, that position stretched the bounds of even his imagination. Just how flexible were Kate Beckett’s mind and body, anyway?)

She had barely played with him ever since he offered—only half-joking—to rub lotion on her to protect her sensitive skin from the Cuban rays, and then suddenly today, all bets were off. While she threatened to zip him up in a leather hood and teased him with words like _hot, wild,_ and _kinky_ in that excruciatingly sultry voice, the glint in her eye was more playful than ever. Darkly playful. Dilated pupils playful.

Either she really did have a new boyfriend bringing out her naughty side, or . . . she had Castle.

 _Ricky,_ according to her.

She had referred to him twice—for investigative reasons, of course—as _my boyfriend, Ricky,_ and even Barry from The Love Shackle had made some priceless assumptions about them, but Castle still couldn’t gauge whether or not she was actually seeing someone else. One dinner out did not a relationship make, and he knew she wasn’t obligated to tell him; he wasn’t looking for a breakup before they ever got started. Still, he was hopelessly curious.

Is that why she’d made no move to go out with him again after their night at Remy’s? Or was it all just part of the game they played?

Taken or not, the sheer number of fantasies that she had evoked in him in just one day was insurmountable.

It was going to take measured effort to plot his story and stay on-task with all of that still running on a loop in his head.

Cruel, cruel universe.

So very, very good.

* * *

Kate had no plot—at least nothing worthy of a procedural story. And no matter how much she tried to make the connections, she still didn’t always know how or why the characters ended up where they did.

But she _was_ getting better at something.

She was getting better at incorporating details whether they had everything or nothing to do with where she’d been lately or what she’d seen, blending what she knew and what she imagined. She was getting better at imagining, at going with the flow and letting Nikki and Rook do all the talking.

Among other things.

_“If we kissed right now,” Rook said, burying his gloved hands in the pockets of his thick coat, “do you think our tongues would freeze together?”_

_“No.” Nikki didn’t even slow down, walking with purpose through the woods on the snowy mountainside._

_When she glanced at him over her shoulder, he still looked skeptical—a surprisingly good look for him. “How sure are you?”_

_“Sure enough.”_

_“How much is ‘enough’?”_

_She stopped just ahead of him and pivoted on her heel to lean in beside his ear and whisper something he wouldn’t soon forget. Then she continued on the path alone, leaving him stunned in place._

_He took a second to recover. Only a second. “Are you volunteering?”_

_“Just walk, Rook.”_

_He fell in step behind her. “Wouldn’t be worried because you don’t think it’s that cold out, or because you aren’t wet for me right now?”_

_“Walk,” she commanded._

_“Ah, so you are wet.” He cocked a brow at her when she finally looked over her shoulder again._

_Wordlessly, Nikki pushed him against the nearest tree and grabbed his wrist. Without bothering to remove his slim leather glove, she shoved his hand inside her panties._

_He moaned against her cheek: “I can’t feel you through my glove.”_

_Her voice caught at the sensation of Rook’s leather-clad fingertips as she murmured back: “I didn’t do it so you could feel me.”_

* * *

She was in charge. He knew that. He just thought that he would enjoy it more often.

It had been fun to watch her debate client rights with Lady Irena yesterday, and to watch from the Observation Room today while she dominated William Caraway, the Smart Ass Masochist. It was less fun to watch her order Ryan and Esposito to the dungeon and assume that Castle would still gladly accompany her to the university. And even less fun to realize that she was right.

Damn it, Beckett.

Not that he was making an appointment anytime soon, but now that it was known around Lady Irena’s that they were investigating a murder, he would have liked the opportunity to go back. Certainly beat the university where that self-righteous professor had insinuated that Castle had a little mind for laughing about Jessica’s choice in research. If he was going to be humiliated either way, he’d take the ladies in leather.

But, as he was reminded yet again, riding along with Beckett meant he didn’t get to call the shots. It was her team, her turf.

While Ryan and Esposito headed out, shameless grins on their faces, Castle decided to make the most of the situation and have fun the old-fashioned way, trying to coax her into a round of storytelling with him.

“That Kelly seemed so unassuming. I wonder if she has inner crazy-eyes,” he said. “One day, she sees Jessica’s research. . . .” Then he trailed off deliberately, waiting for the magical moment that Beckett would pick up from where he left off.

Instead, she grabbed her keys from the desk and shrugged ambivalently, as though he should be grateful that she heard him at all. “Anything’s possible.”

Not the response he’d wanted, but he could work with it. “Can I drive?” he asked, brightening.

“Except that.”

He scowled behind her back as she headed out. He knew well enough that she never let him drive, but it was just hard to fathom how she could be so relentlessly mean, denying him so many pleasures at once. Had she no mercy?

Looking over her shoulder, she called for him, her voice barely low enough to assure him that she wasn’t overheard: “Castle, you coming or do you need to be leashed?”

No mercy whatsoever.

At least she was wearing leather.

* * *

They hit a snag after they found the lipstick print in Mistress Red on the wine glass. Namely, that Lady Irena was suddenly unreachable.

There was little else that put Beckett in so fowl a mood besides hitting a snag both so late in the workday and so close to solving a case. If the domme had been reachable—and if the ensuing interrogation had gone more in the detective’s favor than their first encounter had—Beckett might have been soaking in a tub within the hour.

Alas, she was at her desk, staring in the face of dead-ends on the domme’s whereabouts because, like any clever and infuriating suspect, Irena had apparently turned off her phone and gone without using her credit cards for at least the past six hours. She wasn’t at home or at work.

The receptionist at the House of Pain had been particularly unhelpful, reciting that it was none of her business as to where the Lady of the House was on her own time. Even Beckett’s powerful personality and the benefit of the law could do nothing to get information out of her if Lady Irena had already guaranteed that the information was not available. She had, and it wasn’t.

Beckett was about ready to go medieval, as Castle had put it last time.

It was too bad that Castle didn’t take the hint now.

He was all for holding out for a shred of possibility, but all he could see was that Beckett was exhausted and frustrated and this investigation was up in the air and going nowhere like a submissive in suspension.

And he had secretly hoped that he would be able to convince Beckett to go to dinner with him.

His mother and daughter both had plans with friends and it was less a matter of not wanting to be alone as it was an interest in rekindling whatever the hell they had at Remy’s and combining it with the inferno that was the cumulative sexual tension of these past two days. He always did like science experiments, especially those with the potential for sparks and explosions.

But the only sparks he was igniting tonight were on Beckett’s short fuse, and he didn’t know any better than to get out before she blew.

He didn’t say so, but he just wanted so much to see her smile. He set a mug of coffee on her desk; she didn’t even twitch.

“How’s it going?” he asked tentatively.

“She’s got my balls in a vise so about as you’d expect.”

He swallowed and nodded and screened out every anatomical comment that came to mind. “Maybe you should’ve told her not to leave town,” he said, trying to be helpful, “though I guess that wouldn’t have worked as well this time, her being a lawyer.”

“Castle, I’m not in the mood.” She still didn’t look at him, and even though he knew what had her upset, the lack of affirming attention was eating at him.

“I guess she would have known better.” His face opened with suggestive mischief, the kind he thought she might genuinely appreciate. “Maybe you should’ve tied her to a bed.”

“Castle,” she snapped, finally looking up at him. “Go _home.”_

He did, but he felt like he’d been put in the corner alone.

He would have preferred a spanking.


	18. On to the Affair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out the AU twist to this story called “Whatever You Want.” It includes the previous chapter and part of this one, and then veers in another direction.

She wasn’t as hard on anyone as she was on herself. She hung around a bit later at the precinct, beating herself up about not staying one step ahead of the suspect, but eventually she needed to yield to the fact that she couldn’t camp out in the bullpen all night, waiting for Lady Irena to turn herself in.

Beckett went home.

* * *

Being a Smart Ass Masochist wasn’t really working for Richard Castle. Sitting alone in his loft, his own little corner of SoHo, he came to terms with this.

Two factions were warring inside him.

First there was the part of him that refused to let Kate Beckett go, the part that couldn’t do so if he tried. He wanted to be with her, and not just _be_ with her—entwined with her limbs in all their lithe glory—but to _be_ with her, to stand by her, to keep her company even in her missing-suspect misery.

Then there was the part of him that refused to disrespect her wishes. Wanting to be with her didn’t seem to be a good enough excuse to inflict even more misery on her, to make her feel either ignored or unheard altogether. He didn’t want to prove that he was just as selfish and inconsiderate as she ever believed he was.

_Do whatever you want to do. You always do, anyway._

It was the first time in a long time that he thought of that fight at his book launch, back in the fall.

His complete and total failure to figure out what he really wanted, let alone to tell her; the way he only infuriated her somehow instead. The furrow in her brow as she provoked him in kind. Neither one of them actually saying much of anything. The torrid dance that accomplished nothing but driving them away from each other.

They had worked through that on some surface level—never to any great depth or detail—but it seemed like an awful lot of pointlessness in hindsight.

And he had a point to make.

* * *

The knock on her door was crisp; the rhythm vaguely incomplete, as though interrupted. She knew why when she opened the door to reveal Castle shifting a brown paper bag in his arms. It was haphazardly wrapped in a white plastic bag with a big yellow smiley face printed on the front.

He offered no greeting; only explanation. “Handles broke.”

She noticed them and nodded dumbly, still making no move to beckon him inside. “Chinese food,” she said, as though he needed her to tell him what hot, steamy thing smelled like that and came in a bag with a smile.

“It’s the future,” he said, voice equally informative, face still deadpan. She’d said _for future reference._ She never said _when._

“Yeah,” she agreed, but before she could make up her mind about how this was going to go, he was already walking past her and setting the bag down in the kitchen, stoically relieving both the weight and the burn of his hands.

His relief was subtle enough that she wouldn’t have noticed it at all if she hadn’t been watching so closely; still poised at the open door as though she might actually kick out a hungry, wounded gift-bearer.

She wasn’t unaffected at the sight, but she showed no sympathy, either. Likewise, she didn’t order him to go, but she wasn’t exactly playing hostess.

It wouldn’t have mattered; he made himself comfortable, shrugging off his coat.

Without saying so, she tried to rub in the fact that coming over uninvited and without calling first was dumb on his part, even if he wasn’t entirely unwelcome: “What if I’d still been at the Twelfth?” she asked.

“But you weren’t,” he replied, effortlessly retrieving her silverware as though he did this every night.

She spoke over the untimely grumble from her gut, woefully reminding her that she’d neglected herself tonight; that he’d been right not only about where to find her but also about the state of her stomach. “But what if I _was?”_

“Then the food would’ve gotten cold by the time I found you.”

No conceivable response could have thrown her off the way that did.

The idea of him going through the trouble of pursuing her, trying both her apartment and the precinct, just to bring her Chinese food?

It wasn’t like she would have expected him to wait endlessly at her apartment door to surprise her. She just would have expected him to give up or go away or—not to have tried at all.

In fact, she’d told him not two hours earlier to go home. What the hell was he doing here?

Even as he pulled out a few takeout containers that smelled like salvation, she allowed the venom to surge back up inside her and asked pointedly: “And what if I’d had company?” She did her best to make it sound like that actually could have been a possibility.

But he didn’t miss a beat. “Then you would’ve had to fight for the second fortune cookie.”

At that, she rolled her eyes and shut the front door, seizing the opportunity to hide a trace of an unbidden smile, and joined him in the kitchen.

* * *

She was stuffed.

Only for one moment did she hesitate when Castle asked if she wanted the last steamed dumpling. Thinking better of it, she waved noncommittally at the container in his hands. “You can do the honors.”

Fork poised over the dumpling, he met her eye. “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“But you would tell me if you did want it.” It wasn’t a question, and since he didn’t seem unsure, she couldn’t tell why he was still looking at her the way that he was. “You just had enough.”

She gave him a funny look right back and promised, “Yeah. I know my limits.”

He speared the dumpling before reaching for something else altogether. “Then I guess you won’t mind if I take your fortune cookie,” he said, popping the dumpling in his mouth while fingering the clear wrapper.

“Oh, no. Drop the cookie,” she ordered as though it were a weapon. The little panda bear depicted on the wrapper smiled back at her. “You can have the fortune. I have no use for that.”

“No, that’s the rule,” Castle said around his mouthful. He swallowed the last of the dumpling as he kept the cookie out of her reach. “You eat the cookie, you lay claim to the fortune. Unless, of course, you changed your mind and I can have it. . . .”

She leaned in more than he expected she could—seriously, just how flexible was she?—and snatched the wrapper. “Not a chance.”

He picked up the second fortune cookie. “You ever add ‘in bed’ to the end?” he teased.

“You can’t take anything seriously, can you?”

“Actually, Alexis and I usually add ‘with zombies’ instead, but—wait. Are you telling me you want to take fortune cookies seriously?”

Wordlessly, she conceded the point.

He would have helped himself to a tally on his scoreboard, but he was too engrossed in the moment to remember it; he wanted to continue the conversation before Beckett had time to feel uncomfortable in the silence. “You know these wouldn’t even sell in China?” he asked. “They were based on a Japanese recipe before they became a Chinese-American thing.”

“I think I read something about that in _The Joy Luck Club,”_ she said. It had been a while, but a classic story about mothers and daughters was hard to forget, not to mention an insight about one of her favorite kinds of food.

He nodded. “Blame the American appetite for ‘vaguely Asian’ stuff.”

For the first time in months, Beckett thought of Danishes. She could no longer remember what they’d been called when they were named for Vienna, let alone the name of the original Austrian recipe.

No matter how many times she’d read _Heat Wave,_ she still remembered who she was. And even at times when she’d been unsure—after the Halloween party, and after Coonan died—it was none other than Castle who had reminded her with no more than a gentle brush of his fingers and the soothing words, _“Now you’re yourself, Kate.”_

He knew her so well.

Again Castle broke the silence; roused her from her thoughts, fiddling with the wrapper. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he promised, waggling his brows.

She shook her head as though trying to be disappointed in him. “When has that line ever worked?”

“Hey, anything’s possible except for me driving,” he reminded her, holding up his naked cookie. “Last call. You in or out?”

“Fine. Yeah.” She discarded her wrapper.

He unfurled his fortune and read aloud: _“A friend will be important to you and your forthcoming success.”_

“In bed,” she added when he didn’t; teasing him a little too easily before realizing why he had hesitated, why a new expression had washed over Castle’s face from the fortune alone. Something like recognition, gratitude.

She had wondered as recently as Christmas, but she didn’t need to wonder anymore. He considered her a friend. Even after she chewed him up and spit him out tonight, it didn’t change how he saw her.

A friend. If she was instrumental to his success, it was not simply as a muse. She was sure of that.

His own moment of genuine humility had caught him by surprise, but as he recovered, he had the good sense not to comment on _forthcoming success in bed;_ in fact, found a way to laugh off the whole fortune. “Mm. Wonder which of my friends is going to help me fend off zombies,” he said. “I hope it’s Joe Schreiber. The only thing better than zombies is space-zombies.” Then he crunched and chewed and nodded toward the unbroken cookie in her hand. “All right, give it up.”

Without any trace of reluctance or dispute, she broke it in two and pulled away the pieces, but she had no sooner opened her mouth to speak before she shut it again. Her brow furrowed ever so slightly, and Castle made a sacrificial decision on the spot.

“You don’t actually need to.” Admittedly, it wasn’t that selfless a sacrifice; it served to prove what he came here tonight to prove: that he would push her, but he wouldn’t _push_ her. He would keep redrawing her line, but he would never intentionally cross it.

It wasn’t that he actually believed there was anything so personal about a mystery fortune from a takeout restaurant; giving it to her to keep to herself just seemed like a fairly simple way to make his point.

“Oh?” came out of a strangely dry throat. Without the presence of mind to swallow, she tried to compensate by licking her lips. “And what’s the penalty for not going through with a deal?”

She still heard it in the back of her mind: _We made a deal, and I expect you to honor that._ She knew she’d considered them to have moved past that point, going so far as to ask him to walk her home from Remy’s in spite of their bet, but part of her was still waiting for the day that Castle would throw her terms back in her face.

“No penalty,” he said. She had gone into it willingly, and that was something. He only shrugged and told her, “Circumstances changed. A deal isn’t a deal anymore if one person has to force the other. So if you won’t share, I won’t make you.”

“Good,” she said, ignoring his less-than-subtle subtext and rallying back to a place of superior confidence, “because I wasn’t going to.”

“Sure you weren’t.” He smiled and stood, scooped up the wrappers from the cookies and tossed them in the paper bag, cleaning up after them as a courtesy to his companion.

Then came the part of the evening he’d planned all along, and just when he’d started to feel like he wasn’t going to be able to go through with it, this fortuitous conversation had encouraged him.

He made himself the first to say good night.

He did it gently, lightly, letting it come across as simply time to go and not like she had chased him away.

In order for his plan to work, she needed to sense that the decision was his and his alone; that it wasn’t a ploy to play hard-to-get but an active choice to respect her time and space. She needed to see that he knew her unspoken wishes well enough to fulfill them; that he knew her implicit boundaries well enough to adhere to them; that what he didn’t know, he would gladly learn.

She had to realize that he had redrawn her line—invited himself into just a little bit more of her life than she thought she could manage—and agree to meet him there and only there.

And for a moment, he was afraid that she was going to destabilize them; that she would not be able to relinquish the power of drawing; that she would take a step back or a step forward just to stay in control. If she took a step back, there was no way to know whether she would ever come to trust him. If she took a step forward, he wasn’t sure that he could trust himself not to take another too soon.

Whatever he may have wanted, he needed her to yield.

She did.

* * *

Once he had gone, Kate succumbed to temptation to read the little scrap of fortune again:

_“Conquer your fears or they will conquer you.”_

Was there nothing in the world that didn’t come down to power?

* * *

The cabin was soon warm and aglow with a fire in the fireplace, a haven of privacy and heat even as the snow began to fall heavily outside.

By the time they stripped down to their underwear, Nikki had Rook right where she wanted him: flat against the bed beneath her, at her mercy. She wanted him to know just how much at her mercy he was.

_She was still kissing him when she palmed the head of the bed and blindly located the leather cuffs she’d hidden there. She gave him a sassy smirk and buckled one around his wrist. They’d be secure enough that they wouldn’t give even if he struggled against them._

_But Rook didn’t put up a fight. As she worked adeptly on the second cuff, he only grinned and said, “You’ve done this before. And not just as a cop.”_

_She liked to lead, and she was enjoying his restraint. “And you can tell,” she said, sounding equally unsurprised as she finished securing the two cuffs with a snap hook at each connection point._

_“So I guess that makes two of—”_

_She didn’t let him say “us.”_


	19. She Just Needs

_He was pressed to her back, flesh against flesh. His fingers trailed lazily along her curves, tending to her as he would tend to fading embers._

Having finally closed the case and finished her paperwork on the victimized dominatrix, Kate was enjoying a quiet day off, resting in a red armchair at the café as rain doused the street outside. But the sound of the rain and the murmur of the patrons only lulled her into her imagination, and as she filled her notebook, some part of her slipped away to the wintry cabin where Nikki and Rook were snowed in and too wrapped up in one another to care. Kate could see them so vividly; she could hear them, too.

_“I’m not big on spooning.”_

_She expected him to call her out on the lie; remind her of their first morning-after, how she’d nestled into him without complaint. But he didn’t._

_He simply tucked one leg between hers and used it for leverage, pulling her weight with him and propping them both up until she was resting between his thighs. “We’re not spooning. We’re sitting.”_

_Wiseass._

_It still looked suspiciously close to spooning to Nikki, but at least sitting upright wasn’t exactly snuggling for pillow talk. And leaning back into Rook was kind of like leaning into a warm chaise lounge. Even now, she liked the fit._

_He wrapped his hands around her waist, and she traced her fingertips over the broad leather cuffs on his wrists, still a little surprised that he was so willing to play her game by her rules._

_But her fingers were not the only ones to wander. Rook started to tease her until she wriggled from his touches, sighing hopelessly._

_From his place behind her, around her, he parted her legs with his own and held them there as his fingertips continued their exploration._

_She was flooded with the warmth of arousal, just barely managed to speak as her hands flew to his. “Is this your idea of topping from the bottom?”_

_“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, obviously playing dumb, because in that moment, he folded her hands to her chest and wrapped one strong arm across the front of her body, securing her in place with nothing but strength and creativity._

* * *

Richard Castle studied the raindrops on the windowpane, each slipping into another before descending as one.

There was just nothing else to it. Either Kate Beckett needed to take the lead or she needed to follow his, or else they would never get anywhere.

Not that where they were already was not someplace he was enjoying, but now that they had made some strides toward a new kind of camaraderie, a new kind of closeness, it was difficult not to imagine a time when he could hold her flush against him and learn to interpret her shivers from the mere feel of them.

Of course, just because he could identify what they needed, that didn’t mean he was any more ready to broach the subject than the protectively layered detective-muse. Beckett made it abundantly clear that this research arrangement made her feel exposed, but he had found it easy to hide behind his persistence to know even more of her than she knew of him.

He remembered finding out that she subscribed to his website and smiled at the thought; remembered her reaction to the cover art of _Heat Wave_ and almost chuckled to himself, catching it just in time as he came back to the place where he was.

He realized that he had zoned out, thinking about Kate, and what else was new? He drifted back to the sound of a woman’s voice, incessantly demanding and just a little bit belittling. Oh, right. Gina.

He tried to conjure up his poker face so Gina couldn’t tell that he was mixing business and pleasure without her.

As hard as this was to do, it was infinitely easier to pretend that he wasn’t thinking about Kate than it was to stop thinking about her.

* * *

_He let his free hand meander along her skin, moving from efforts of teasing her to pleasuring her and alternating between them—whether more for his own enjoyment or more for hers, she couldn’t be sure. His legs remained curled around hers, holding them down no matter how she writhed and wrestled with him._

_“You’re not fighting this as much as I’d expect you to if you wanted to escape,” he said, his breath hot at her ear. “I’m strong, but I don’t know that I’m this strong. Are you just exhausted or are you enjoying this as much as I think you are?”_

_“It doesn’t suck.”_

_“Hmm,” he hummed into her. “If I still had them, I’d put on the leather gloves. I know how much you liked those.” He paused, as if considering something._

_She could practically hear the wheels turning in his head, even though she couldn’t gauge exactly what he was thinking. “What?”_

_But he only teased, “What, what?” as he climbed out from behind her and leaned her back against the bed._

_She propped herself up on her elbows and watched as he removed the leather wrist-cuffs._

_He took one of her hands in his and secured a cuff to her wrist, a strangely serious look in his eye; a look she didn’t well recognize. She decided it suited him, somehow._

_She laughed, but she let him fit her with the second leather band. “What, you going to cuff me to the headboard now?”_

_“No.” He reached past her head for something, but she couldn’t quite tell what._

_“Why don’t I believe you?”_

_“I don’t know,” he said. “You should. You have my word.” And with that, he easily folded her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms beneath her knees. Then he secured the cuffs together with a snap hook, rendering her limbs essentially useless to her and all of her most sensitive parts exposed to his sight and touch._

_Just how easily Rook restrained her was, admittedly, a surprise. “What the hell?”_

_“You’re just jealous that I did you one better,” he said with a grin. “I only needed one snap hook.”_

* * *

“I need a title, Richard. And all you’ve given me is a gossip girl and ballplayers and politicians and mobsters.”

He tried. Really, he did. But business and pleasure were still swirling together in his head, impossible to compartmentalize when Kate Beckett was already so much a part of both. _“Gossip . . . Heat.”_ Off Gina’s look, he said, “Right. Yeah. What was I thinking?”

Gina massaged her forehead. “She gets tied to a chair. What about _Bound Heat?”_

Rick cringed. No way was that going to fly with Beckett.

Not that he needed her permission on this or anything—she was only his disapproving work-wife in investigation. But still. If Gina didn’t castrate him now, he’d like to know that Beckett wouldn’t later.

He tossed out an idea that he didn’t really like but which seemed like a compromise: _“Scandalous Heat.”_

But she dismissed it: “Too long.”

“Hey, I apologized—”

“The _title,”_ she hissed, clearly making no time for his innuendos. “Now walk me through it again. The basics.”

Rick sighed and worked his way through the book’s premise as though retracing his steps: “Well, a gossip columnist turns up dead, and she’s a contact of Rook’s so he manages to get involved in the case. And it turns out that his article brought Nikki some unwanted attention, even though he thought she’d be flattered. But since she’s not really the type to draw attention to herself, she just feels vulnerable and naked. Oh!” He snapped his fingers at an epiphany: _“Furious Heat.”_

“Oh, I like that,” Gina said, looking away in thought, but what she liked was not his suggestion at all. _“Naked Heat._ God, it practically sells itself.”

“Whoa, wow, now wait.”

She didn’t. “Eye-catching, ear-catching, good rhythm, short and sweet and sexy— _and_ you even get your little layer of emotional subtext you like so much. What’s not to like?”

“False advertising,” he argued feebly. “I mean, doesn’t it sound like . . . porn?” This, of course, from the man who once brushed off Beckett’s ire over what sounded to her like a stripper name.

Back then, he’d invoked artistic integrity to counter her commands to rename the character. _(“If I cave now, what next? What next? What more demands would you demand of me?”)_

His objection today was less fierce than Beckett’s had been, but that didn’t mean he felt any less personally violated.

Besides, it wasn’t just possessiveness about his character (surpassed by little else but his possessiveness for his own daughter and a certain muse). He’d invested a lot of time and energy into the book already and it wasn’t even finished yet.

All that work he put in, he thought, getting Nikki and Rook to keep talking to each other instead of falling back on their default setting to fuck it out, only for it to be bound and sold as _Naked Heat._

She leveled him with a stare, like she couldn’t believe he was serious. “There’s a sex scene again, right?”

“Well, sure . . .” Two, at present. More until he’d scrapped the rest.

“Then it isn’t false advertising. And since when are you squeamish about pornography, Richard?”

He thought: _Since the woman you want me to sell flicked a paper star at me and laughed._ But he said, “I’m not squeamish. I—was just hoping that this one would have some class. You know, sequel to a bestselling success, strong plot, a decent case, stands on its own merit without over-sexing the characters like fanfiction.”

“Oh, that reminds me. I hope none of your fans have used the title already. We’ll still get the copyright, but I really don’t need the accusatory letters,” she said, and continued to rattle off the details of going forward.

It was then that he suspected that Gina had won.

He sighed and nodded along like a long-forgotten bobble-head. He never even bothered to keep tally with her. Considering the distribution of power in their relationship, an imaginary scoreboard wasn’t really worth the effort.

But he prepared himself to up the tally in Beckett’s favor. He’d let her win as many times as she needed in order to forgive him.

The story formerly not known as _Naked Heat_ was supposed to serve as an apology. Now he had the uneasy feeling that there would come a time that he would need to apologize for the apology.

Ah, a whole new abuse of irony.


	20. Extraordinary

A strange sensation overcame her. Being curled into a ball made Nikki feel safe, certainly less openly vulnerable than she’d made Rook by cuffing his wrists to the headboard, but it wasn’t long before she realized just how vulnerable she really was, how thoroughly he had limited her range of motion and her power.

Swaying side to side accomplished next to nothing, and she could do little else but let him shift her body by maneuvering her legs; little else but succumb to the temptation to enjoy herself, to enjoy Rook. To trust him.

She did.

* * *

_I’ll be damned,_ thought Kate. _She trusts him._

It was quite possibly the only direction she did not expect this story to take.

She had no storyboard, no summary. She vaguely remembered imagining that Nikki would eventually fly solo; remembered how another story slowly emerged in her free-writes, the story of how Nikki and Rook reconciled and proved that they preferred to work—and play—as a team. But this?

It was clear now that, at least in Kate’s world, Nikki trusted Rook whether or not she was solely in control—such trust was meant to work both ways—but Kate never would have given it much thought if Rook hadn’t taken the decisive action he did, ever so carefully bending Nikki to his will. He didn’t only respect her strength; he respected her boundaries. He didn’t only keep her safe; he made her _feel_ safe. No matter which role he took, he played it with her best interests at heart.

No, not at heart. In mind. Her best interests in mind. It wasn’t like Nikki and Rook were bonding heart-to-heart. That was a trust that they did not share.

Or was it?

Nevertheless, it remained that there was plenty to the character of Nikki Heat, and Kate figured that uncovering a few surprises along the way was not unusual in writing, especially when one wasn’t actively planning and plotting or even asking, “What would make a better story?” to decide where to go next.

Wasn’t that what Vince Minaret had taught her months ago, right here in this café? That, once set free, a story could fly away in unexpected directions? And—

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.

Kate had no sooner closed her notebook and glanced around the café when who should she see, sitting across the room in his own deep red armchair, but Vince Minaret.

Chewing her cheek and off-setting her jaw in thought, she rose and strode to him, her vanilla latte long forgotten on the table.

He never saw her coming.

“Hey,” she said, startling him mid-sip. He dabbed his mouth with a napkin before turning to see his visitor.

“Oh! Hey.” He offered her a modest smile and gestured for her to sit, but she remained standing.

He seemed not to be bothered, as though it were only natural that she wouldn’t formally join him. Of course, she had no idea that he’d read that she and Castle were an item just in time to spot them at Remy’s for a late night out; that her distance now communicated less _psychological edge_ and more _officially unavailable._

She said, “Usually I wouldn’t even ask, but I need to know.”

“About?”

“Your book. _Grin.”_

Vince laughed at that. “Five hundred pages and you want to know more? Usually people tell me I could have written less.”

She wanted to remind him that it was 499 pages, but why quibble over one page? Let Vince have his 500-page fantasy. She remembered Castle choking on his vanilla milkshake and smiled.

Vince noticed and, not knowing what she had in mind, smiled, too, as though enjoying an in-joke before he was let in on it. “What?”

“Why did you kill him?”

Clearly he needed a moment to process that. Accusations of murder can have that effect on people.

Kate mercifully elaborated: “Your main character.”

“My main character?”

“Were you bored with him?” That’s why Castle killed Derrick, wasn’t it? Not that any of this had anything to do with Castle.

“No,” he said, looking confused. “And there are two main characters.”

She could see where he was going with that. “It’s just—it’s called _Grin,_ right? It just surprised me that it became so much about Nina. Her grief and her half-hearted non-relationship with Victor and the years she spends trying to get her husband’s work back in print—”

“Actually,” Vince interjected, “once they’re married, they’re both named Grin.”

That explanation didn’t appease her, and no doubt he could tell.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “He spends his life telling her story through his writing. And she spends her life telling his—not just in sharing his work and his legacy, but through the way she lives. Because his impact is far more than what he writes. It’s also how profoundly he’s changed her. Changed her life.”

“So you’re saying he’s never really gone,” said Kate, her skepticism giving way to her underlying love of the story; an acceptance of possibility and new perspective. “He’s a part of everything she is and does, even when he isn’t there.”

She thought of her conversations with her dad—the love he had for her mother, how deeply she had touched his heart, how difficult it was for him to forget her, how he finally came to accept that he didn’t want to forget and that that was all right.

She wondered if she would ever know love like that beyond her family.

Vince nodded, sipping at his coffee. “He was extraordinary. His love, his loyalty, his dreams. She can’t stop thinking about him.”

Just then, a man at the counter caught her eye. She recognized him from the back—from head to toe and, yes, fine, everything in between. Her heart lurched into her throat. Her face grew warm, and her mind raced with thoughts of what she would say to him when their paths crossed.

Then the gentleman turned around and, though he was somewhat ruggedly handsome in his own way, it was most definitely not Richard Castle. Her heart slumped down again into her chest and took a moment to settle back into its proper rhythm.

“And even if she could,” Vince added, “she can’t stop living the way he’s taught her to live.”

“I like that,” she admitted. “I guess I didn’t see it that way before. Who knows? Maybe I’ll read it again sometime. Fresh eyes.”

“Wait a couple of years,” he said with a smile. “Even fresher eyes, that way.”

* * *

Castle dreaded telling Beckett about the latest development on the upcoming book. If their history was any indication, it wouldn’t end well for him. He may not even live to see the book released.

If he failed to mention it, it was only with some hope of self-preservation and respect for Beckett’s own dignity that he did so.

Fortunately, Paula had big news for him; a nice, juicy distraction. Heat Wave was up for film production, and Castle gladly closed the deal.

Of course, it was strange to be involved even marginally in the process of recreating Heat Wave, since he was already knee-deep in _Naked Heat._

It made him think about how he and Beckett were off-kilter—how, as he worked through these next three books, he would always be one book ahead of her. He would always have the mentality of the next novel while she was still wading through his old words.

He would always see Nikki and Rook through a different lens than she would. He relished moments like their long road-trip to Connecticut, when he could tell her about the story he was working on and enjoy her feedback. But other than that, it occurred to him that she wouldn’t really catch up until the end of the series.

To her, Nikki and Rook had bantered and fallen into bed, sure, but they didn’t trust each other or care for each other or even appreciate each other the way he believed they eventually would throughout the next few books.

Of course, she did practically confess to reading _Heat Wave_ multiple times. And if that didn’t light a fire under him to keep writing, not much would.

But if she liked the story as it was, part of him was still hesitant to show her the next installment in its entirety. What if she didn’t like where the story went? What if she saw Nikki and Rook differently than he did?

 _What if_ is invariably one of a writer’s well-honed skills; it’s no secret. It’s practically a stereotype. He told himself it would make a better story if he could be a writer who didn’t obsess over what ifs.

And anyway, he’d probably be healthier for it.

Heading into the bullpen as he ended his phone call with Paula, he decided once and for all that he would focus on the movie. He wouldn’t worry about what Beckett might think of new content or developed relationship arcs. And he certainly wouldn’t tell her yet that the next book was going to be called _Naked Heat._

 _Yeah,_ he thought, _Beckett would never go for that._

If only he knew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be an epilogue, set a few years later, posted as the next chapter.
> 
> But in the meantime, there’s more to the story!
> 
> Will Beckett come to terms with the fact that Castle gets her hot and bothered? Can she admit to Castle that she writes about Nikki and Rook? If he ever found out, what would he think?
> 
> The saga continues from here with “Packing Heat,” set during 2x17, between the red wine and the infamous pancakes. Then there’s “On the Back Burner” (2x21-3x01) and “Californication” (3x22).
> 
> Depending on ideas and interest, I may eventually write another installment, add epilogues to the old stories, and/or continue the alternate ending to this story, “Whatever You Want.”
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	21. Another Nikki Heat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few years later . . .

She sees a ship on the horizon, the sky aflame with sunset.

He stands with her, and the warmth of him at her back is a solid contrast to the breeze off the water. Softly he brushes his hand against her abdomen, her belly swollen with their greatest joy. She looks up over her shoulder and savors his smile—her favorite kind, the one that makes his eyes crinkle—and they share a laugh as the life inside her makes its playful presence known with a tiny kick.

He kisses her, wrapping his arms around her and intertwining their fingers. “Soon enough,” they tell each other as they turn to watch the waves on the shore; soon enough, they’ll play with their child on this very beach.

His arm is draped over her body when she wakes; his hand tucked under the hem of her loose T-shirt, his thumb tracing lazy lines along her toned belly.

When she realizes that she’s been dreaming, that there is no little life beginning inside her, the feeling of loss is more visceral than she would care to admit. Her heart aches with it, not because of any regret in her waking life, but only because the serenity of the dream was so great.

She hasn’t told him yet that she sometimes dreams of having a child with him. That she’s had these dreams before, before they were ever together.

He’d probably run the other way.

And anyway, she’s still enjoying the sweet newness of what they have and who they are together. 

Sometimes it feels like only yesterday that she pulled him to herself and whispered kisses of remorse and longing. Sometimes it feels like they’ve already shared an eternity. Being with him—finally being with him—is so fresh and beautiful and familiar and comfortable, all of these things all at once.

They’re only now planning their first weekend away together in the Hamptons, and she blames the location of the dream on that anticipation. But for the recurring theme of children, who are sometimes infants and sometimes grown and sometimes only swollen bellies, she has no logical explanation other than her innermost desires and what she sees in Castle.

She has long appreciated his thoughtfulness and his courage and his imagination, but his persona as a loving father, whenever he’s let it shine through, has always topped the list. His own baby is grown now. She wonders if he would ever want to take on that role all over again.

But right now is not the time to figure out what he’ll be. Right now is the time to appreciate what he is. Right now he is her—well, yes, her boyfriend. She told Ryan she was going away next weekend with her boyfriend.

Castle is her boyfriend.

And he has some of the most irritating ringtones, she decides, when Yoda’s voice disturbs the quiet.

_Your phone. Ringing it is. Press the button you must, and fulfill your destiny._

Without moving an inch, she tries to rouse him: “Castle.”

“Mm.”

_Your phone. Ringing it is. Press the button you must, and fulfill your destiny._

“Castle.”

“Uhn.”

“Phone.”

_Ringing it is. Press the button you must, and fulfill your destiny._

He wakes now, taking a moment to savor where he finds himself. To him, Yoda isn’t nearly annoying enough to make him skip one of his favorite morning rituals.

Kate Beckett is in his arms, in his bed, in his life.

He breathes her in and smiles into her hair, presses his lips to her shoulder. In turn, she kisses his forearm—the one that’s tucked beneath her neck and nearly numb by now. He can’t remember how long he’s been spooning her, but if it ever comes to it, it’s worth an amputation.

The other hand slips out from beneath her shirt, but he barely shifts the mattress. She can sense him trying to reach behind him without actually lifting his head or leaving her side. Whatever he’s doing, it sounds painful.

Her eyes are still closed and she wouldn’t be surprised if his are, too. It’s one of those mornings, isn’t it?

He hits his hand on the nightstand hard enough that he has to shake it out. Now one hand is numb and the other is on fire. He still doesn’t open his eyes as he fumbles for his phone.

The ringtone is relentless, unaffected. Neither pleased nor fazed, Yoda is.

Kate sighs: “Just roll over and pick it up!”

_And fulfill your destiny. Your phone. Ringing it is._

It stops, and he answers.

She can hear the murmur of the voice on the phone but can’t identify the caller or the words. Judging by his responses, the message sounds fairly positive.

“That’s great,” he says. “Oh.”

Murmuring. Lots of it.

“Well, I think—ah, let me get back to—okay. I’ll call you back.”

She doesn’t ask, but either she’s not-asking very loudly or he just feels like filling her in. She turns over on her other side to face him while he talks.

 _“Frozen Heat_ is selling like hotcakes,” he says. He winces at the simile and revises it in his head as he burrows into the blankets they’d eventually foregone in favor of snuggling. “It’s early. Let me try that again. . . . It’s doing well.”

Kate smiles as she gives him a soft kiss and wraps an arm around his shoulder. “That’s wonderful.” He glances away, his face betraying unusual uncertainty, so she asks, “Isn’t it?”

“Yeah . . .”

“What’s wrong?”

He holds his breath for a moment; ultimately chooses to confess. “They want another one.”

“Who’s they? The Jedi?” she teases.

“That would be amazing but no. As far as I can tell.”

“That was Paula,” she supplies when he doesn’t, “asking you to extend the series.”

He nods. “Book Five.”

“Good,” she says. “After the way you ended the last one, I was hoping to find out what happens next.”

It was quite the cliffhanger. And besides, when Kate first read _Frozen Heat,_ she couldn’t help but think that Nikki and Rook have finally caught up to her perception of them. The more she wrote her own scenes, the more she felt like she’s always been at least one book ahead of canon. But Nikki trusts him now. And it’s a new kind of trust—not just physical. It’s profound.

It’s about damned time.

She wants to know what more he imagines for them.

Castle’s voice is more tentative than he means it to be, but he’s a little surprised at his partner’s gentle enthusiasm. “So, you’d be okay if I wrote another Nikki Heat?”

“Mm.” An ambiguous sound, smooth and mysterious. And then a smile playing at her lips is his only shot at a warning before she holds his face in her hands and kisses him breathless. He’s just beginning to respond in kind when she pulls back. Then she acts as though she hasn’t just planted a wet one on him in total sneak attack mode; just calmly carries on with their conversation: “Why wouldn’t I be?”

That’s good to hear—provided that he’s ever going to be able to write that fifth book for her.

She sucked his capacity for words right out of his mouth.


End file.
